Red Team

In the course of my recent researches, I’ve come across a term that I rather like: red teaming. It refers to a practice in US wargames and intelligence, whereby a group of experts and spies will be broken into a blue team and a red team, with the blue team taking on the role of the US military and apparatuses of state, and the red team takes on the role of the enemy. Some of this is about trying to estimate enemy tactics, but its most vital function, from what I’ve read, is to highlight flaws in your own. Red teamers have to be creative thinkers, highly knowledgable, and willing to detach themselves from classic my-side biases they usually operate under. Most of the greatest intelligence failures in US history — notably 9/11 and Pearl Harbor — were, in some sense, a failure of red teaming: we didn’t know where the weaknesses in our defenses were, or inasmuch as we did we weren’t worrying about them.*

*Another classic red team activity is that of the white hat hacker, who breaks through the defenses of a company or government department in an attempt to highlight their weaknesses. At the beginning of the Robert Redford classic Sneakers, Redford’s ragtag crew of techies are performing this kind of function for banks.

This term spoke to me because — if you’ll forgive the impertinence — I sometimes think I’m a born red-teamer, which can be frustrating in an age of curated information silos, unchecked motivated reasoning, and rampant confirmation bias. I’ve long thought of this as a form of contrarianism, though it’s really not that: I hold fairly standard lefty views on things like the welfare state, social justice, and the value of a polyethnic, polyphonous society. It’s that my instinct, when presented with people I agree with, is to ferret out the hypocrisies and weaknesses of their arguments — arguments which are, after all, often my own arguments. I realize that this might sound like a kind of bragging, and maybe it is; but in reality, this is not something I did, exactly. It’s just a habit of mind. I could spend a lot of time analyzing where it came from, psychologically, but it’s not that interesting, even to me. Suffice it to say that my brothers are both natural red-teamers, too, so it probably comes from our childhood and/or genetics, somehow.

Maybe this is just self-flattery, but I’ve come to believe that a lack of red-teaming is really plaguing liberal (or progressive, ugh, what a shitty word) thought these days. Everybody from the campus speech police to the activist base of the Democratic Party is suffering from a problem where their ideas aren’t trouble-shot by smart people; in an environment where political ideas have become conflated with cultural identities, it seems to me that it’s really hard to have the kind of cross-political discussion that results in understanding where your arguments fall apart. This leads to an assumption that our ideas are inevitable, or obvious, or incontrovertible. (And before you get on the they’re-worse-than-us-about-this horse, I’m sure the right has this problem, too. But I’m not a conservative red-teamer, I’m a liberal red-teamer, so I don’t care about that.) It feeds self-righteousness, and I honestly think it’s part of the vicious cycle whereby politics and identity became conflated in the first place.

Let’s take, for example, the concept of privilege. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that the variety of behaviors, incentives, and cultural forces that currently go by the name of privilege on the left, and in academia, don’t exist; that strikes me as patently absurd. Of course they do. The problem is that the term privilege is completely destructive. The word was loaded long before it became a byword of the social justice movement; being told that you were privileged was tantamount to being told that you were weak, you had never earned a thing, that you were, in short, the bad guy in the story. That was before it got larded up with a bunch of complex stuff about race and gender. The word is judgmental; the word is mean. It makes people feel attacked. And that’s why going on and on about privilege is of extremely little value.

I can just hear your voice, dear blue-teamer, as you groan. I understand that instinct. There’s some blend of I don’t really care about hurting a bunch of white people’s feelings and Of course you think that, you’re a white dude in there. I’m not here to plead for the left to be nicer to white men, or at least not chiefly. I’m here to ask you what the term privilege achieves. Because I would posit that what it very distinctly does not achieve is an erosion of privilege, or the conversion of the privileged to liberal ideals. Instead, it (A) increases factionalism, and (B) alienates those who could be allies. This is about what it does in the mind of the person who wields the term, as well as the mind of the person at whom it is wielded.

As a for-instance, think about the reaction among some people on the left to the tragic case of Otto Warmbier, the American college student who was detained in North Korea, and recently died shortly after being released from that nation’s custody. Inasmuch as people were paying attention (I’ll confess that I wasn’t, really, and wouldn’t have been able to remember his name until he was released last week), most people expressed shock, and horror, along with incredulity about the North Korean government’s explanation for why Warmbier was detained (that he had stolen a government propaganda poster). But there was a distinct strain of thought among the insufferably woke segment of the left that basically said this: Warmbier’s white male privilege had led him to believe he could get away with anything, and this was his just deserts. (See Alyssa Rosenberg’s roundupfor a decent compendium of a few of those reactions. And before you start attacking Rosenberg’s politics, dear blue-teamer, remember that she was an early product of that notorious incubator of reactionary politics known as . . . ThinkProgress.) This is the use of the privilege frame to reinforce the ugly politics of identity and difference. People who gloried in Warmbier’s arrest and sentence could not have known much more about him than that he was white, male, American, a member of a fraternity, and a student at the University of Virginia — one of America’s best public universities, no doubt, but also a classic stronghold of segregation and patriarchy. But to weaponize the idea of privilege in this way is, in fact, unfair, stupid, destructive, and ugly. Whether or not Warmbier was a member of a fraternity at a conservative school, the truth is that the only thing that matters is that he’s a person, and whether or not it was his privilege that caused him to feel empowered to pull down a poster (and I’d argue that [A] we have no idea if he actually did that, and [B] teenagers of all races and genders are prone to doing things like that), it is unacceptable to dehumanize him using the privilege frame. And yet this kind of of thing happens a lot. It’s rarely this egregious, but because privilege is a word that was so loaded to begin with, it often ends up as a tool of dehumanization.

The other idea is a little squidgier, and if your instinctive feeling is that you don’t care about offending a few white dudes, then you won’t cotton to it. But as a member of the red team, I have to tell you that there are a lot of intelligent people who could be made into allies, except for the fact that they feel attacked, and ultimately alienated, when the word privilege starts getting thrown around. The word feels like an attack. Hell, the word often is an attack, dressed in a posture of defense. And there are (at least) two things to be remembered here: (1) that human behavior is ruled by cognitive experience, not objective fact, and so if someone is told they’re privileged when they feel like they’re they’re the opposite, they’re almost certainly going to react with hostility; and (2) that, shifting demographics aside, there are an awful lot of white men in this country, and if you call yourself progressive, ie, what you seek is progress, you will get farther by describing the truths behind the concept of privilege without making white men feel under siege. I’m not trying to blackmail anyone into conceding to the will of the majority, or the historically powerful; I’m not asking people to kowtow to historical elites — I’m asking people to think about gains and losses, allies and enemies, and basic humanity. You should not willfully make enemies of those who might be allies. To do so by swinging around the club of privilege willy-nilly is just dumb. Sorry, blue team. This is one of your weaknesses.

Anyway, I hope you see what I’m saying. I am in no way contending that men, or white people, have not been systematically advantaged by cultural, social, and legal forces, more or less since the founding of the republic. I’m not here to tell you that affirmative action is evil or that we should stop putting people of color in action movies or positions of power or any of that stuff. I’m red-teaming this idea. I’m trying to see where its weak spots are, so we can make our arguments better.

There are a lot of ideas on the left that could use a little constructive red-teaming, by the way. I hadn’t actually intended to make this whole post about privilege, as a term, but as usual I got away from myself. I’d say that the idea that mounting more “progressive” candidates in house races, as a way to appeal to “the base”, is the way forward for Congressional Democrats, isdefinitely one of them. A nationwide $15 minimum wage is another. Allergy to globalism and free trade is yet another. The assumption that the implementation of a social welfare state would be win-win, if only we could get greedy Republicans to leave office. That the white working class is the key to the future of the Democratic Party. (That one, in particular, strikes me as not only deserving of a little red-teaming, but of total destruction.) The list goes on.

Ugh. Now I’m tired. I wrote this whole thing in less than an hour. ZZZzzzzzzZZZzzzzzz . . . sorry. I don’t have the energy for an artful conclusion.

Gallows Rumor

As my loyal reader has no doubt noticed, things have been a bit quiet in these here pages the last few weeks. There’s a very good reason for that: until last Friday, I was pushing hard to make a deadline, which had the twin effects of keeping me very busy and totally zeroing out my ability to write about anything else. Seriously, emails, text messages, everything fell by the wayside, as for the first time I could really feel the last big corrections being made on a book that I’ve been hammering away on for more than five years. As I approached the end, it dawned on me that the project was enormously ambitious, in a way that I’d never really understood before. Though the final manuscript is coming in at about 120,000 words — 450-ish pages, in print form, if the internet is to believed — I’ve written well over 200,000 words, all told, and thrown out nearly half of it. The book has long, highly technical stretches; it has 75 footnotes; it contains at least 27 named characters, almost none of whom can be removed from its plot without destroying the mechanism; it involves several real-world figures; it tracks with actual events in March and April of 2008 . . . I’ve got used to feeling a bit like a failure, because of how hard it was for me to write this book. I’m realizing now that the reason it was so hard was because it was an enormously difficult project to undertake. Holy crap. I really did all that?

In case you can’t tell, I’ve been working with my therapist on feeling better about myself, with interesting, if not perfect, results. I’m used to living in a constant haze of anxiety and self-loathing, a state of mind in which everything that fails to happen fails to happen because I’m a failure. For a long time, that was how I felt about this book. It had taken me so long to write because I wasn’t a real writer. I was struggling to end it because I was a dilettante. It wasn’t that it was an enormously ambitious novel about money and the American id — it was that I sucked. Now that I’ve finished it, I feel less that way. I still worry that it’s not good, but that’s a constant with me and my writings. I love them, I hate them, I cannot judge them.

But there’s another very good reason there hasn’t been much activity hereabouts for the last few weeks: I’m exhausted. I’m not exhausted from writing, though that’s also the case; I’m exhausted by the world, and its incessant spinning. I’ve had a lot of individual thoughts about what’s happening in the world right now over the last few weeks, most of them of the morbidly humorous variety, but things keep moving at such a pace that they get swarmed and dragged under by other events and other thoughts before I can even articulate them. And besides, I think I learned something from the late unpleasantness among the American electorate, and it’s not just that nobody gives a shit what I have to say: I’m wrong all the time. Not that I didn’t already know that. And not that I’m wrong about everything. But I had some unexamined assumptions — or, more like, semi-examined assumptions — that have proven to be untrue.

Chief among these is that I always assumed there were adults in the car who had their eyes on the road and their hands at ten and two on the wheel. I figured that Donald Trump, a fatuous gasbag, a transparent con-man, a villain of nearly comic book proportions, would be stopped. I thought that the unending torrent of scandal, the stern warnings of editorial pages, the uproar from mainstream politicians of both parties, the clear distain from every living President, and so on, would eventually dissuade enough people that he couldn’t win. I wasn’t optimistic about a Clinton presidency — though I do think she gets a bad rap, I think the political environment after a narrow political win in such a nasty election was going to be completely impossible for an old-school Democratic insider to navigate, especially one with so much baggage — but I was pretty sanguine about the Clinton campaign. And though it did take a spectacular confluence of events to beat her, she still lost, and by the lights I usually use to guide myself, that shouldn’t have been possible. I tried not to be one of the smug elites who sneered at Trump, especially given that I’m closely related to a fair number of people who voted for him. But it drove something home to me: the American experiment is fragile, and it may have shattered without my noticing.

I say that this assumption is semi-examined because the entire thesis of my book, and a lot of my political/economic thinking for many years, is exactly that there are no adults driving the car, just people, and even the smartest people are pretty dumb. How did I write 200,000 words on the themes of cognitive bias and rampant irresponsibility, and completely miss this? I don’t know. I wasn’t unaware of the history. Vietnam—>Watergate—>Iran-Contra—>Lewinsky—>9/11—>Iraq War—>Great Recession—>Tea Party—>Trump. That’s an unrelenting maelstrom of evidence that even the adults in the room aren’t really in control of anything, that they’re still making decisions based on self-interest, imperfect information, delusion, and group identity. And yet.

It’s left me shaken. By my lights, the first month of Trump’s Presidency have been just as ridiculous and troubling as I expected. From the spectacle of the President and aides examining documents related to a North Korean missile launch in the middle of a crowded restaurant with their smartphones on, to the blatant inhumanity and idiocy of his attempts to ban people from certain countries form the United States, it’s all exactly as bad as I thought it would be, and if I were still as sure of the roles that institutions and elites play in the society, I would be finding it hilarious. But Trump’s campaign was just as chaotic and ridiculous as his administration has been thus far. A huge chunk of the country either didn’t care, or didn’t care enough to abandon their political identity to guard against this. I realize now that one of my own biases, to which I was not previously totally insensitive but which it is difficult to police, is that I am exactly one of the elites that people were rebelling against by voting for Trump. My tribe is the tribe of the big city, the well-educated, the multicultural — the winners, more or less, of the last 40 years of American history. I’ve always been keenly aware of the privilege afforded to me by wealth, and I’ve grown increasingly aware of the privilege afforded me by my race over the last five years or so, but I think I missed the degree to which I was a part of an increasingly small class of people for whom the American story, the one white Americans have been telling themselves for a hundred years or more, continued to ring true. It’s true that liberals have lost a lot at the ballot box, and my own preferred political policies involve higher taxes and a more robust welfare state and slavery reparations and gun control and gay rights and so on and so forth — but every time taxes got cut, I benefitted; every time Hondas and Volvos got cheaper to buy, I benefitted; every time a new piece of technology emerged, I benefitted; every time urban renewal led to gentrification, I benefitted; every time a big city got more liberal, I benefitted. The practical effects of the national abdication of my agenda touched me, personally, very little, and so I think I came to believe that, in the end, the natural order was that life would march forward in more or less orderly fashion, and everybody would come to understand that the things that had made my life a richer, better place would eventually work for them. In short, I took my eye off the ball, and I feel like I just woke up to the reality that reason doesn’t win the day and the good manager model of bureaucracy and politics wasn’t the inevitable victor, in part because the good managers were almost all more or less like me. All of this despite the fact that I have no faith in humanity and a low opinion of people who have high opinions of themselves. Holy shit!

I’m meandering a bit now, but you should take this as evidence of how hard it has been to organize all my thoughts lately. That last, very long paragraph could be annotated in almost every sentence, and if I were writing this for something other than my blog I probably would be doing just that. Bleh.

One thing I want to be very clear about, however, is that, despite all the hand-wringing above, I have reached some conclusions, and they’re not all like, “I should empathize with Trump voters more.” In fact, as a person who has a tendency (to paraphrase baseball great Theo Epstein) to view the world from 30,000 feet, I actually see that set of gymnastics from people on the left as a self-defeating exercise in setting back their own agenda. It’s valuable to empathize with Trump voters more because they consistently vote against politicians and policies that will help them; but the point there is to get them to vote with you so you can implement your ideas. Going further than that would perpetuate the American story that most people of color have had to tell themselves for most of American history: what white people want, they get; if black and brown people benefit, it’s more or less by accident; and if white people want black and brown people to suffer, they will. Politics isn’t a game — it can be deadly — but it absolutely must be gamed.

This has got way longer than I meant for it to, so I’m just going to go into list mode now:

(1) I joined the Democratic Party. Despite being a liberal, I’ve never been a Democrat. I’m over that. The only power is in unity; the only unity is in party, at least in the American political context. Another semi-examined assumption: I have always preached that letting the perfect be the enemy of the good was ultimately destructive; and yet I’ve boycotted the Democrats because they were less liberal than I wanted.

(2) I re-registered to vote in OR-2, where the condo I own is. I spend a fair amount of my time there, and my vote matters more there. I own nothing in Portland; there’s a strong argument, actually, that almost all of my actual interests are in Bend — the family business, the family property, my own personal property, etc.

(3) Marching is good, and I plan to do more of it, but it matters less than other actions. It is important to confront Republican members of congress with what they’re doing, and what they’re enabling. That’s one of the ways in which empathy can matter — it’s tempting to view them as inhuman monsters but they’re not. They do not like to be shamed, yelled at, annoyed, or whatever. I think one of the reasons that Republicans are in power in this country despite the fact that their voters are a minority is that a lot of us gave up on this kind of thing.

(4) Resist at every opportunity, and that even includes symbolic shit like buying from Nordstrom. It will remind you of what’s important.

(5) Be wary of our own versions of Fox News and Breitbart. This is empathy, too — conservatives are not necessarily less than liberals; we are all human animals. It stands to reason that we would be susceptible to the same forces, ie, confirmation bias and apophenia. In fact, you can already see it happening.

(6) Facebook is for organizing, venting, and animal videos. It is not where you should get your news.

(7) It’s time to understand that the boogeyman of the “Mainstream Media” is in fact one of the most important sinews that has held America together, and buckling to the right-wing idea that it is lying or impossibly biased against you is empowering the forces of conspiracy, mendacity, and chaos. Read the Washington Post. Read the New York Times. Read the Wall Street Journal. Don’t suspend disbelief, remain critical, but do not cocoon yourself in liberal propaganda.

(8) Recognize allies when you see them. Backbiting and infighting are stupid.

(9) Spend a few minutes every day unplugged. Go running, or for a walk. Read a book. Put a cowboy hat on your cat. Play checkers with your kid. Smoke a cigarette. Take a bath. Play the guitar. Write a note to your girlfriend and tape it to the refrigerator. Eat an apple on the back porch. Go swimming. Juggle. Go to a play. Lie in your bed with headphones on listening to Wilson Pickett. Drink coffee in the shower. Watch a black-and-white movie. Try to read something in French. Wander around the library trying to figure out which book you want to read. Mow the lawn without earbuds in. Meditate. Ride a train over a bridge and look at the scenery.

America Agonistes

    You’ll be glad to hear (I assume) that I am no longer depressed, not in the all-consuming way I was a couple of weeks ago — in fact, as a matter of brain chemistry I’m more or less fine, and am having a bit of a hard time conceptualizing the headspace I was in the last time we talked to one another on this blog. I have finally resolved myself to the fact that I’m going to have to be medicated for the rest of my life. One too many close calls and eventually you get in a wreck. Should probably put that seatbelt on, if you see what I’m saying.

    But. But this morning I sat in the bathtub for an hour and worried about Donald Trump. Then I got out of the bathtub and sat down at my desk to work and worried about Donald Trump. Restless, unable to get anything done, I finally went to the supermarket, where I worried about Donald Trump. I was so wrapped up in my worry about Donald Trump, in fact, that at one point I rounded the corner into the produce section and discovered I couldn’t decide what to buy. I mean, I knew what I needed — a vegetable to go with dinner tonight. This is an easy decision. There are three vegetables I know how to cook. But I stood in front of them and just stared, and stared, and stared. Finally I put some apples in my bag and just wandered off. Later I came back and grabbed the first thing I walked by — asparagus. I don’t even like asparagus very much, but there you have it.

    As I left the store, I found myself doing a curious thing: I was reminding myself of the things that are not in Donald Trump’s power to change, that will remain good, no matter what happens next Tuesday. In no particular order, some of these things follow.

1. Apples will still grow, and taste clean, tart and bright when you bite into them. A fresh ripe one will still resist just enough when you bite to crunch when it gives way. Its juice will still get on your chin and your hand will still be sticky after you eat it.

2. Sharp cheddar cheese will still cause that pleasant tightening in your jaw, the unbidden rush of saliva to your mouth, will still smell pungently of itself and taste lovely on bread with thick slices of ripe tomatoes.

3. When you wake up in the morning just as the sun is coming up, its light will still fall quietly on trees and streets of your neighborhood, and you will still think that this is a good place, this place you’ve found yourself in.

4. One day you will find yourself running — to catch a bus, or your kid, or a hat blown on the wind — and you will remember being a child, and running for no reason, with no destination in mind, just because it brought you joy to be in and move your body, and you will feel a little bit that way again, if only for a second.

5. You will still, if you wish, be able to put tiny pieces of rubber in your ears and from them will pour the music of James Brown, or Claude Debussy, or the Ronettes, or Beyoncé.

6. You will still come to the end of a really good book, close the cover on the last page, and lie back on your couch and stare at the ceiling in a state of wistful ennui, wishing a little bit that you could go back and read it all over again without any memory of how it unfolded in your hands.

7. There will still be a cute Australian woman who works at your cat’s vet, and every time you go there you’ll look at her wedding ring and think idly about a different world in which that ring wasn’t there and you asked her to go to coffee with you after her shift, and you will still smile at the thought every time.

8. There will still be hot days in summer when the sun stays up till nearly ten, and you will still hear the neighbor kids playing soccer in their front yard. There will still be diamond-like winter days when the sun strikes the snow in just the right way, and you will see a thousand tiny crystals of ice, each its own unique size and shape, glinting. You will still go walking on a foggy autumn morning and smell the sweetness of fallen leaves mulching. There will still be a day each spring when you see the first purple crocuses turning their faces to the weak and distant sun.

9. You will still fall in love, or not. You will still have children, or not. You will still meet people and learn new things about the human race that surprise you, and some of them will be good things. You will still say something funny to the woman in the checkout line at the supermarket, and she will still laugh. You will still stick your tongue out at toddlers when their dads aren’t looking. You will still pet friendly cats that approach you on the street. You will still have strange dreams and tell them to someone who only half-listens and goes, “huh,” when you’re finished. You will still see that guy around the neighborhood who goes shirtless and wears American flag swim trunks all summer. You will still go down to Waterfront Park and wonder why the teenagers there don’t try to sell you pot until you remember you can just buy it in a store now. You will still think wistfully of the days when you could eat pineapple without getting heartburn, and then eat some anyway. It will still be worth it. All of these things will still happen, every day, to someone, and sometimes it will even be you.

Election Blues

    I’m struggling to believe that anything will ever work out right now. Some of this, I think, is chemical; I have a mental illness, and once every few years it comes around to make me feel completely numb and hopeless, to remind me of how meaningless human endeavor is and discourage me from ever doing anything. I mean, I have a chronic problem with feeling out-of-control and pessimistic, but this is another order of thing, a waking-up-feeling-awful thing, an inability-to-get-pleasure-out-of-anything thing, a hate-myself-all-the-time thing, a nothing-will-ever-change thing. Now and again I have a spell that lasts a day or two, but it’s much rarer that the mood comes and stays for weeks on end. For whatever reason, that’s what’s been going on with me the last three or four weeks. Every night I go to bed and hope the following day will be better; every morning I wake up and it isn’t. Though I know, intellectually, that eventually it will wear off, it can be hard to see the end of it from inside.

    There may in fact be some causes beyond the chemical, though. I’ve been trying to write something about the election, about the way it’s making me and so many of the people I know feel, but every time I try to bend myself to that task I end up taking stock of where my life is, versus where it was eight years ago, when the current President was first elected. It’s not that my life is worse now than it was then. It’s that it’s the same. I live alone with a cat, I’m completely flummoxed by the idea of getting a job that pays me for the thing I’m best at (writing, natch), nobody outside a very small group of people ever reads anything I create, and I’m chronically unhappy about all of it. I have made attempts to change these things and they just . . . haven’t worked. No matter what I do, I’m still me.

    I went back and read a couple of things I wrote on the eve of Barack Obama’s inauguration, a couple of really hopeful things, full of praise for the future President and praise for the system that had empowered him. When I wrote those things, I was hopeful, not only about Obama, not only about America, but about myself. The whole country had been so handicapped by racism and resentment, and yet here we were, about to show that we really could do so much better than we had. Why couldn’t I do the same thing? I imagined my life in eight years as a much better, healthier, happier, and less lonely place than it was. It all seemed possible.

    But the last eight years have been a really punishing lesson in how hard it is to change, how much remains to be done, and the dangers of changing in the wrong way — for me, and for the country. A lot of white people reacted to the election of Barack Obama by FREAKING OUT. They could not conceive of a country in which their happiness coexisted with racial equality. In fact, they couldn’t conceive of racial equality at all — attempts to encourage it, to repair the damage of racism, appeared to them to be an agenda of punishing white people for their whiteness. It was either white supremacy or white genocide. There was nothing in between. And now we have Donald Trump, their avatar, doing his fascist messiah thing, ranting madly into the sky, trying to destroy America in the name of saving it. Given the myriad ways in which careful attention to current events will remind an observer that white supremacy is alive and well in the laws and institutions of the United States, it’s frightening and discouraging to see it thriving so brightly in the hearts of the country’s citizens.

    And me? I sometimes feel like my attempts to get better have made me much worse. I went to graduate school, an elite one, which had been a goal of mine for a long time — and while there, I had a comprehensive mental breakdown, a total loss of perspective and self-awareness that left me on the verge of failing out, drinking my days away in an attempt to feel anything other than sadness and shame, sleeping very little, leaving my apartment almost never, abandoning the meager friendships I’d managed to forge there. The me who walked out of that experience was much more damaged, much farther from hope and happiness, than the me who wrote soaringly of the man and country I was so fleetingly so proud of all those years before. It’s now been two years since I got my degree, and aside from the rush of relief I experienced upon leaving a city that I hated and program I felt I had squandered, not much has changed. I’ve struggled to get better, and for a while it felt like I was. But as the country has descended into madness, my own has returned. Sometimes it seems like Donald Trump is an outgrowth of my own psyche, a roaring destructor I’ve designed to torment myself with. I know it’s not true, but it feels like it is.

    The day Barack Obama was elected, I cried, tears of happiness and relief. My entire adult life to that point had been lived in the Orwellian nightmare of the George W Bush administration, which began with a stolen election and ended with a shattered economy, and I was just . . . I was aghast that something good might happen. The day he leaves office I suspect I may cry again, even if his replacement isn’t the screaming madman on the Republican ticket. It’s not because I think Hillary Clinton is such a terrible replacement — she seems perfectly capable, to me — but because the years that intervened have all been thrown away, wasted on reactionary recrimination, siphoned off from a life that we all only get to live but the one time. What a terrible shame it is, to dispose of your time on this planet in such a way.

Track This, Buddy

1. The Feeling

    There were a couple of times this weekend when I had to stop, pull my head out of the fetid waters of Twitter, and look around. Remember this, I thought. Nothing like this is ever going to happen again. It’s easy to miss remarkable things because you’re so caught up in them. They wash over you and you find yourself remembering that they happened, but not how you experienced them.

    I don’t know about you, but I experienced the last two weeks, the two weeks during which it seemed like Donald Trump could no longer contain the weight of his ego and history of bad behavior, as an addict’s lapse — in more ways than one, if I’m completely honest. I had been trying to turn down the volume on the election, to quit screaming about it, to release my minute-by-minute hanging on it, largely because I knew: (A) who I was going to vote for, and (B) there was nothing I could do beyond that. Spending all my time fretting and talking and getting into vicious twitter wars with Trump trolls and emailing my congressman and shoveling money into Hillary Clinton’s coffers and pleading with people younger than me to understand the grave consequences that can come of thinking of your vote as an act of personal expression rather than a choice — no value. I had to get away from it. So I had shut down my Twitter account, unsubscribed from 538’s newsletter, made sure I quit going to the Washington Post’s website the instant I woke up in the morning.

    But then the bombshell about Trump’s taxes, which seemed like enough to effectively end this campaign, and I was back at the Post every morning, and checking 538 fifteen times a day to see Trump’s odds swooning. And then . . . The Tape. It was too good. I had to know more. I logged back in to Twitter. And I sank right in, like an addict in relapse. It felt comfortable to be here, with news ping-ping-pinging off my eyes, as the last artifice of Donald Trump’s campaign fell away, and all but the most deluded and committed could no longer deny who and what he was: a villain, pure and simple, uncomplicated by any moral impulse and unchecked by the experience of living a real life.

    And it was then that I looked up and tried to take a breath. It was a cool, drizzly day in early October. It was just after the one-year anniversary of the day I temporarily crippled myself while running. I was halfway between my thirty-sixth and thirty-seventh birthdays. The leaves in my neighborhood had begun to take on the hues of ripe apples. I had a bit of a backache and appeared to be pulling out of a mercifully brief bout of soul-killing depression. Perhaps not coincidentally, I had spent the last week drinking too much, in a way that I hadn’t done in more than a year. There was a whole world going on everywhere around me. And — and — this incredibly important thing was happening: our nation’s fliration with a demagogue appeared to be ending, because we’d finally figured out what a creep he was. Nobody knows how big the blowout’s going to be, and nobody knows what the aftermath will be like. I’m honestly not very hopeful about it. But the worst case scenario had been narrowly averted. I tried to breathe in and feel what that was like.

2. Right Track / Wrong Track

    I’m not going to do any virtue-signaling about locker-room talk, or try to tell you anything you don’t already know about Donald Trump’s disastrous tape. We’ve all seen enough of that by now. I’d rather talk about something that’s been on my mind for the last couple of years, but which I think I finally figured out how to express this week.

    For a long time now, polls of Americans find that when they’re asked whether or not the country was on the right track or wrong track for the future, overwhelming majorities have said that it was on the wrong track. The Real Clear Politics average shows that it’s currently 33.2 points underwater, meaning that more than 60% of the country thinks it’s on the wrong track, and about 30% thinks it’s on the right track. These numbers have been quite bad since early in Obama’s tenure, cratering at under -50% back in October of 2013. Oh my God, is the standard take. What a disaster. How awful this is for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

    To which my response is, What?

    I think the problem with that read on the situation is that it assumes a far more unified country, the country of the postwar consensus, the country that delivered 44 states to LBJ, and 49 states to Nixon, and 49 states again to Ronald Reagan, than the one that actually exists. You can ask that right track / wrong track question to four different people, and get an answer that sounds the same — “wrong track”, they say — but is actually four different answers.

    Take, for instance — well, me. If you had asked me, at any time since shortly after the Republican takeover of Congress, when it became clear that the people who now occupied the legislative branch were not just Republicans but extremist, ridiculous nutjobs, many of whom did not believe that Barack Obama was legitimately the President of the United States and had no committment to governing or leadership, if I thought the country was on the right track or the wrong one, I would have said, Wrong, wrong, wrong wrong wrong. I would still say it today, because, though the disaster has been averted, there’s still a huge chunk of the electorate who has been so comprehensively lied to that they’re going to start the new administration believing that the President belongs in prison, and will vote for congresspeople who tell them that. I am a classic Obama coalition voter, of one kind: I’ve lived almost my whole life in big cities; I have an advanced degree; I was 28 years old the first time he was elected — your basic, technocratic, neoliberal, lefty elite. But I think this country is going to hell in a handbasket, because the right is doing all it can to drag it down there, mostly out of delusion and spite.

    But then you ask someone like my late uncle, an unreconstructed small-town fatcat, the kind of guy who may never have known a person of color personally in his whole life, and he would have given you the very same wrong track response, but for utterly different reasons — because the country’s president was a unrepentantly left-wing urbanite who didn’t understand that what was best for business is best for America, and who mostly wanted to give away free stuff to people who really, when you thought about it, just needed to go get a job. (Nevermind that most of this is false, that kind of belief was genuine, and unshakeable.) I don’t know if my uncle had an opinion on Trump, but he had a lot of opinions about Democrats, and anybody who was going to cut his taxes was someone he liked. He and I hold opposing views on nearly every economic issue, and many social ones, too. But we agree that the country is on the wrong track.

    And then you get into territory where I’m mostly guessing, because I only know what I’ve read. If you asked a 60-year-old black woman who fears that her son and grandson can be murdered with impunity by police, would she tell you the country’s on the right track, or the wrong one? If you ask an Egyptian-American who attends a mainstream mosque but had their car spraypainted with a racial slur last week, would they say the country’s on the right track, or the wrong track? If you ask a 19-year-old white kid from southern Missouri who has little more than a burgeoning Vicodin addiction to his name and not much prospect of getting more, would he say the country’s on the right track, or the wrong track? If you asked 30-something mom from Phoenix whose parents are immigrants from Mexico and have to watch Donald Trump on the news every night, would she say the country’s on the right track, or the wrong track?

    This list goes on and on, and it renders the question completely useless. Some of these people might actually have genuine reasons to believe that the country is getting better, though at that point I think maybe you’re just measuring people’s inborn optimism or pessimism. The question has no value. I think it has basically no bearing on this election and never would have done, because we, as a nation, can’t even agree on what the problems are, let alone what the solutions to those problems might be.

    Okay, rant over.

Rage

    So I didn’t put anything on social media about my thoughts going out to the victims of the Pulse shooting, and I didn’t change my profile picture, and I didn’t write about it the day it happened. There are a lot of reasons why not — that such gestures feel disingenuous to me was a lot of it — but the chief one, the one I feel right now, the one I felt last night as I sat in a bar reading a book and imagining what it would be like if someone walked through the front door and blew the head off the nice-seeming hipster next to me, is that all I have is completely and totally impotent rage. The impotence and the rage go hand-in-hand: the former wouldn’t feel so terrible without the latter; the latter wouldn’t exist without the former. They are the parents of my silence.

    Maybe later in the week I’ll find something cogent to say about the way the fetishization of the founders and Scalia-ization of how we read the Constitution has turned the American right into a death cult more dedicated to lethal toys than sane regulation or living in world not completely diamond-plated in fantasies both dark and light; maybe I’ll pile stats upon stats, make an argument, worry less about how little will change, how nobody who matters will hear, and how it doesn’t even matter if they do — because the most important and powerful people in the world, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, already agree, and yet we are held hostage by the vile fantasies of a collection of venal, small, pathetic weaklings who imagine that their guns make them John Wayne, and that their exclusive desire to fuck women and only women makes them the arbiters of what is right and whole and good; they believe that those who neither tote guns nor participate in their oppressive fertility rituals really, on some level, are just borrowing our lives from them anyway, so who gives a fuck if a bunch of fags in some fag club get shot up? Maybe one day I’ll operationalize this feeling, but for now, all I know is that I would like to hit somebody, hard, and let them know that they deserve it as I do it. I won’t — I never have — but for the love of God I would like to. This murder could stop, if the venal and evil motherfuckers who refuse to stop it truly believed that people who are not like them were human. But it fucking doesn’t, because they fucking don’t, and fuck them all right in their smug fucking faces for it.

    This hits on every note in a chord of rage for me, fortissimo, because my family has been forever altered by the fact that my mentally ill foster brother owned a gun, a gun he used to murder his child and then himself; because I have been writing about, striving for, and just really yearning for gay rights since I was 13 years old; because those on the right who wish to pretend that this is not their fault have turned this into an almost literal crusade against those they consider alien again, talking about “radical Islam” as though any of this could be separated from the homophobia and gun fetishization that they preach on a daily basis; because, in a way that isn’t true of a grade school or a college campus or a military base, this is somewhere that I could easily have been, because that kid texting with his mother could have been me, because the dead lying on the ground might have been my friends, gone, erased by a murder machine purchased legally and deployed exactly as it was designed to be employed.

    Fuck it. In the way of the impotently rageful I have no conclusion, nothing useful to add. I just haven’t been right in more than a day. I’ve been edgy and impolite to strangers. I broke my smoke detector when it went off while I was cooking dinner, because I was so angry. This is over. These are my days of rage.

Crazy / Bernie Sanders People on Reddit

1. Crazy

    About a week ago I was standing in the shower and I had a realization: I’m not feeling particularly anxious or self-loathing right now. I imagine for a lot of people this wouldn’t be any kind of revelation or exciting news, but for me it was, because it hadn’t been true for a long time. So long that I can’t even remember when the last time was that I moved through the world untroubled by those feelings, and a bunch of other, related ones that orbit around them. Years, many. It seems like maybe 7 or 8, though that feels impossible when I think about it. Had I really woken up every single morning for 7 straight years feeling what I would characterize as crazy? How was that possible?

    My particular form of mental illness is insidious because of its changability. Every now and again — it seems like it happens every year or so — I fall, unpredictably and completely, into an arid, desperate place of utter despair, and stay there for a brief period. Sometimes it lasts a few days, sometimes a few weeks. Though this is the disease at its most acute, it’s also strangely less terrible, because it’s descrete, identifiable, and eventually it’s over. Don’t get me wrong, it’s horrible — it feels like my brain is dying while my body lives on — but because I can name it, and know it, I’m comfortable with it. Far more dangerous is the chronic state of low-grade unhappiness and anxiety, punctuated by intrusive thoughts of shame and embarrassment, only occasionally alleviated by a few hours of placidity and optimism. The reason it’s dangerous is that I often don’t notice it; it’s bad, but it seems normal, and therefore eternal. It’s paralyzing, and characterized by a constant awareness of time passing at a terrifying rate. I wasn’t even quite aware of how long this had been going on until it went away.

    Now I get up in the morning and I feel basically fine. Hours and hours can go by without suddenly being brought up short by constant self-criticism or terror that pretty soon I’m gonna be old and then I’m gonna die and I will have wasted my entire life on bullshit. It’s weird, but I keep thinking, Is this what other people feel like all the time? Is this what it’s like to be normal? If it keeps up for very long, a lot of my assumptions about how the world actually works are going to have to change, I think. If you guys all walk through the day just dealing with one thing and the next and not living in a state of constant morbid fear or paralyzing anxiety, a lot of guesses I had made about human nature turn out to be completely wrong. The capacity for both sympathy and empathy is limited by lived experience.

2. Bernie Sanders People on Reddit

    Are fucking crazy. They’ve reached a point where most of them have realized that the primary is going against them, but they just cannot believe that more people don’t agree with them. So many of them have retreated into a sort of fantasy land where shady forces far too powerful for mere regular people to reckon with control everything. Every time someone refers to Hillary Clinton as “a bitch” — that’s a paid Clinton shill, trying to make them look bad. Every time a poll comes out showing their candidate behind, it’s a part of a media conspiracy to keep Sanders’ ideas down. In fact, almost everything is a part of a media conspiracy. It’s a loop of illogic that you can’t penetrate, no matter how hard you try. Lay out the obvious case, and you’ll have a lot of people lay into you: “The Media” is far too large and heterogenous to expect a consistent bias for or against one candidate, you can say, and they’ll just tell you that they’ve been bought off by their paymasters. “The Media” is a group of businesses that want to make money, and the best way to make money is to cover competitive races with a lot of dogfighting and clicky stories, you can say, and they will come back with some nonsense about how rich people prefer Hillary Clinton. Most members of “The Media” are underpaid, overeducated white people who are in constant fear for their jobs, making them natural Sanders supporters, you can say, and they’ll scoff. You can ask, Do you really believe in a hyper-competent, massive conspiracy to rig polling and elections in 30 states, one with an omerta so powerful that nobody has blabbed about what would be the biggest, juiciest story in political history since Watergate, and if you do, why didn’t they just rig Iowa and New Hampshire to run Sanders out of the race before he could build up any steam? And they’ll shrug.

    The longer I observe politics, the more obvious it’s become that the most powerful force in collective action is allegiance to a team, and belief that the other team is both bad and not likely to win. It’s difficult to believe that any member of your team would do anything wrong, and it’s hard to believe that all the work you’ve put in for your team isn’t going to pay off. Because you’ve bought in on the team identity, its arguments have come to seem self-evident to you. When you bump up against the cold reality that other people don’t find them self-evident at all, most people’s first response will be to vilify the other. They are, after all, on the bad team. They must be cheating. Or it must be the officiating. What it cannot possibly be is that the things that seem obvious to me are just a series of subjective opinions.

    The internet makes all of this worse. In real life, a lot of my friends are Sanders people — though not as many as you would expect, in a place like Portland; I think I’m attracted to a certain mindset in people that leads to a streak of independence and an unwillingness to go all-in on ideologues and purity campaigns. But it remains true that Portland is in the bag for Sanders, and I remain friendly with all the same people I’ve been friendly with, not least because talking to people face-to-face reminds you of their humanity. Talking to people on Reddit absolutely does not. It cloaks other people’s humanity in nude language, often language used badly by people who are writing in haste and / or don’t know how to communicate very well via the written word. It rewards quick put-downs, and its system of voting comments up or down gives an easy tool for dogpiling on the other. Go on the Sanders subreddit, and you’ll find some reasonable people. But mostly you’ll find dead-enders — people who still believe that somehow, through some magic, he’s gonna come back and win (a lot of these people have started to take refuge in the idea that Clinton will be indicted, which is the kind of flight of fancy that used to be the exclusive purview of the right); people who will tell you with a straight face that voters in the south don’t matter, Bernie has the momentum, Bernie is electable (perhaps the funniest of the various delusions that get handed around the various Sanders echo chambers on the left), and that superdelegates should pick him irrespective of the primary results (thereby proving once again that the USA doesn’t give a shit about black people, I guess, but most people haven’t thought about that angle); and people who believe with the iron bands of faith that this election was stolen, full stop.

    I know I shouldn’t argue with those people; no one’s gonna change anybody else’s minds. But it pains me to see people with good intentions go so far astray, not least because I think that their candidate's ideas are probably the future of American liberalism (or, well, a slightly more realistic version of those ideas). I still think that in 8 or 12 years you’re going to get a true liberal Reagan — what a lot of us wishcasted for Obama, sigh — who’s going to come onto the scene with ideas very similar to Bernie’s, but with a look, sound, and campaign that more reflects America, and that person is going to shock a lot of people by winning. It’s going to take a lot of hard work, of the institutional kind, the kind that the right did for 16 years that brought the once-thought-crazy ideas of Barry Goldwater into the White House in 1980. But I think people on the left are finally waking up to that fact. Sanders showed there was a constituency for the stuff; the problem is that a lot of people (like me) who are sympathetic to his message flatly didn’t believe that he could get any of it done. Change does not happen in one big wave election. I know people hate to hear that, but it’s true. Political identities (like most other identities) tend to calcify in your early 20s, and they’re very resistant to change after that. That’s why Sanders’ overwhelming support among young people never really spilled over — older people weren’t going to just up and quit believing what they’ve always believed in order to elect some obscure guy with semi-alien ideas who wanted to change, not only the stuff they thought was broken, but all the stuff they liked.

    And that’s the other thing that bugs me, riles me up — the assumption that so many Sanders people had that the reason they were going to win was that all these people who had been living under false consciousness, who had voted for Reagan and Bush and every conservative in between, were suddenly going to come awake to what they actually should believe, just because someone explained to them what that was. It’s insulting, and it belittles people who are already feeling pretty little as it is. I think you have to take what people tell you about their convictions at face value, for the most part. If you want to change those convictions, you have to chip away at them, little by litte, not all in one big flood. If you could do that, they wouldn’t be convictions at all.

A Peripatetic List of Words I've Looked Up, Political Edition

palingenesis — rebirth or recreation; used in philosophy, science, political theory, and theology

    biology — another word for “recapitulation”, the phase in an organism’s development during which it experiences evolutionary change

    theology — reincarnation / baptismal rebirth

    palingenetic ultranationalism— “national rebirth”; one of the core promises of fascism.             Palingenesis in this context is often achieved through violence.

    I saw a video today of a widely-known and -respected photographer named Christopher Morris getting choke-slammed to the ground by a man in a gray suit, as a crowd of white people screamed in orgasmic ecstasy. It’s hard to tell, in the video (or the various others of the moments preceding and following it), if the crowd is cheering for the assault on Morris, the ejection of some black American activists that happened moments earlier, or something else entirely — something said by the man who was the reason for the occasion, Donald Trump. Morris, who works for Time magazine, is a willowy man in his mid-50s who is well-known on the campaign trail, and spent years photographing President George W Bush. In the video, he’s obviously carrying a camera. In a subsequent video, shortly after being allowed to stand, he attempts to demonstrate what was done to him by placing a hand on his assailant’s neck, at which point he is arrested. The Trump campaign says his assailant was a member of the US Secret Service.

    I’m not an historian of anything other than my own life, and I’m certainly not an expert on any political system. I try as hard as I can to be a person who can step back from naked partisanship and see the bigger picture; this is made easier by the fact that I hold heterodox liberal views, meaning there’s basically no group for me to get my identity conflated with in order to obviate choice or annihilate the need for critical thought. I also try, as much as I can, to be cautious about change — the people who promise it, the scope of its possibility, the labels it receives. Unlike a lot of my friends, I was never disillusioned by Barack Obama’s inability to remake the federal government in his own liberal, technocratic image — because I never believed he would. I’m not stating this litany in order to make myself look better or smarter than other people, though I will admit that in my smuggest moments sometimes I do feel that way. It’s mostly about trying to avow my neutrality, to get you to see that I am not, as a rule, one of those lefties who believes that conservatives drink the blood of liberal babies. Because what I’m about to say is going to feel a little bit like that, I suspect.

    In the course of the last few months I have run across the word palingenesis a couple of times, and eventually jotted the above notes on it into a big file I have on my computer called WORDS I’VE LOOKED UP. Most of these words come from the lapidary phrases penned by literary docents, and I keep them so that sometimes I can page through them and feel a certain weltschmerz about my waning on-command vocabulary and how it doesn’t measure up to Zadie Smith’s or David Foster Wallace’s. But palengenesis kept coming up when I was reading about Fascism — real, big-F Fascism, of the sort practiced by Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Adolph Hitler. I was reading about Fascism for the same reason that a lot of people have been reading about Fascism lately: Donald J Trump seems like a bit of a fascist.

    Despite its dire connotations, palingenesis actually helped me maintain a grip on that cautious, skeptical-of-change nature I was talking about before. Make no mistake, Trump’s “politics” (if that’s what you call his unerring instinct for saying what some people want to hear and convincing them that this is somehow an act of bravery) are ugly and dangerous, and there’s a convincing argument to be made that he’s the inevitable result of the white identity politics that the Republican Party has been playing footsie with at least since the days when Nixon was developing the Southern Strategy.* But one of the tenets of Fascism, as practiced both by Mussolini and Hitler, was that they and their parties would bring about a sort of national rebirth — and not just a national rebirth, but a rebirth occasioned by political violence, often in the form of ethnic cleansing. Hitler, popularizing the Dolchstosslegende, or stab-in-the-back myth, asserted that the First World War had been lost, not through the German Command’s various tactical and strategic blunders, not because the Central Powers were vastly out-numbered and out-resourced, not because they awoke the sleeping giant that was the USA, but because lily-livered pantywaists back home chickened out — and these lily-livered pantywaists were, largely, Jewish bureaucrats who didn’t really feel any loyalty to Germany. Germany would be reborn through the violent expulsion or incarceration of such subversives. Eventually expulsion and incarceration devolved into outright murder. And, whatever else you could say about Donald Trump’s various ugly lies and panderings, he was not calling for violence. Palingenetic ultranationalism, one of the core tenets of Fascism, was not a part of his deal.

*Note: links to a Washington Post op-ed written by Robert Kagan, a prominent Neocon who has been slipping left ever since John McCain decided that Sarah Palin was a plausible candidate for national office.

    But the more I watch things like the orgiastic reaction that Trump’s crowds have had to violence — Morris is just the most recent in a long line of people to have come a-cropper of Trump partisans or paid thugs — the more I worry about it. Trump appears to have no fixed ideology other than Trumpism. Though he appears to me to be a fatuous gasbag, he’s managed to build a sort of cult of personality around himself as a compulsive truth-teller and caller-out of bullshit (irrespective of the fact that his “truths” are, in fact, meaningless pablum usually shot through with lies, and there is no bigger bullshitter than himself). He clearly lives for those cheers and screams; without them, he would have no concept of himself. I’ve come to believe that, if he saw the opportunity to accrue more adulation by proposing a program of ethnic and/or political violence, he would do it. He has no shame, or limits, or sense of responsibility to his nation or the world. His desperation for adulation would be sad if it hadn’t become so dangerous. He’s already promising the rebirth — “make America great again”, he says, as though America’s greatness were not, in fact, still completely self-evident in most respects. The US is a nation troubled by economic divides, bad crime policy, and a dipshit system of government, but it is still unequivocally the largest economic, military, and cultural power on the planet. The things Trump claims to want to do — like push people around in trade negotiations — are things we’re already doing. He lives in a dreamy paper world, constructed by the heirs of Nixon’s Southern Strategy, in which increasing diversity and the empowerment of the disenfranchised somehow equates to decline rather than massive progress. When the rebirth one promises largely involves the re-subjugation of troublesome minorities, the call to violence against those minorities is just on the other side of a door. All he needs do is open it.

    I know some people on the left who say that Marco Rubio is “just as dangerous” as Donald Trump; some who fear Ted Cruz because he seems competent where Trump is, as mentioned above, a fatuous gasbag. I don’t have much interest in living in a world constructed by either of those men and the parties they would lead, either, but I think the equation isn’t balanced. Trump’s lack of experience with the traditional levers of power could thwart him; perhaps the Republican Party could co-opt him, as some reports have suggested. My instincts run that way myself; I suspect he would be an embarrassing, ineffectual President, possibly even one who got impeached within a few years of taking office. But there are far more dangerous possibilities in there, too. A man who wishes only to build a cult of personality around himself will have no compunction about simply obliterating the traditional levers of power. Mussolini and Hitler both came to power toting with them paramilitary groups that allowed them to enforce policies that were not, in fact, hugely popular, through brute force. Military leaders could, as one article I saw suggested, refuse to follow his orders — but the white identity politics he plays with appeals to a group of people htat is heavily armed, and ready for a guerrilla action against the federal government already. And even if Trump does not use the militia movement as an impromptu Schutzstaffel, do we really want to live in a country where the military no longer responds to civilian control? I don’t. An America decapitated in a coup is only marginally better than one dominated by a minority of Trumpists and their arsenals.

    Robert McNamara, who had a lot of opportunity to contemplate both nuclear war and human fallibility, once told the documentarian Errol Morris, “the indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will destroy nations.” A modified version of this is why I think Trump is a far more dangerous phenomenon than any more traditional conservative candidate, little though I agree with those people’s political views. It’s possible that we could just let Trump keep going, assuming that eventually he’ll implode, or run up against the limits of his own self-regard, or get lucky and not fuck it up too badly. But that strikes me as an incredibly irresponsible way of looking at things. The indefinite combination of Donald Trump and political power will eventually destroy this nation. Maybe we’ll get lucky, and he’ll lose in the general election. Or he’ll come to heel once he realizes what’s involved in the Presidency. Or he’ll bow to Congress. Or he’ll listen to his military advisors. Or he’ll have a heart attack from the stress. Or any of a number of other things. But do we really want to gamble on that?

My Eyes! They're Berning!

1. A short history of feeling the Bern.

    I’m fairly certain the first time I voted for President, I voted for Al Gore, though I might equally have voted for Ralph Nader — I don’t remember. It didn’t really matter; Gore took LA County by something like 50 points, and California as a whole by nearly 12. I, and every single person I knew, could have voted for Bart Simpson and it wouldn’t have made a whit of difference. This is one of the great frustrations about being an American voter, of course. In a country this enormous, it’s hard enough to convince yourself that your vote matters. (Mostly because it actually doesn’t, really. People are reduced to absurdist tautologies like, “You can’t complain if you don’t vote!” to keep themselves motivated.) When you live in the places I’ve lived — Portland, Los Angeles, the Bay Area, Brooklyn, Minneapolis, even small-town Bend — it feels doubly that way. I’ve never lived in a Congressional district in which the outcome wasn’t a foregone conclusion. In 2000, my Representative was Maxine Waters. She received almost 87% of the votes in my district, including mine. I’ve never lived in a state that was competitive in a Presidential election year — the closest I came was Minnesota in 2012. Obama won it by 7 points and more than 225,000 votes.

    In 2004, I volunteered for the Dean campaign. I look back on that experience — which was mostly disorganized and ridiculous — as a harbinger of much of what was to come. Dean’s campaign was driven largely by opposition to the Iraq War, which was the great, unrepresented policy position in the election that year; Democrats were so cowed by GW Bush’s ability to manipulate the public with the memory of 9/11 that it seemed like they’d never seriously considered mounting a candidate who opposed it. Ultimately, they opted for John Kerry, largely because many party doyens believed his military record would inure him to attacks suggesting he was weak; this didn’t work. Kerry lost a winnable election. Dean never got close to the nomination.

    By now, you’ve heard about Dean’s revolutionary use of the internet, the way he built a donor base of small, committed activists who would give him 20, 50, 100 bucks at a time. That was a huge deal. But I think it misses a big part of what was really happening: I, like many of the dreaded Orange Hats who tottered around Iowa and New Hampshire knocking on doors and generally (it turned out) annoying people with our zeal for our candidate, was very young then. Not yet twenty-four years old. I think, in fact, our youth was a big part of what annoyed people. I get annoyed when kids on the street brace me about political causes. Because of this fact — kids with clipboards are annoying — I think a lot of people misunderstood what was going on. We were dismissed as dilettantes, lefty college kids who would one day come to Jesus and moderate on everything. But that wasn’t it at all. I am right on the cusp of two generations, GenX and the Millenial generation, neither of which I really fit in with. I was born during the waning months of the hapless Carter administration. What people didn’t see about me, and people like me, was that we were the crest of a wave of very liberal young people who were raised in an increasingly diverse world and taught at every turn that acceptance of difference was perhaps the paramount value for existence in America. Our parents, without realizing it, were indoctrinating us with values that a lot of them didn’t quite agree with.

    The Dean collapse was inevitable, and looking back with 20/20 hindsight, I think he probably would have been beaten fairly handily in a general election. What I hadn’t realized yet — what I think a lot of people may never realize — is that you don’t win elections by condescending to the electorate. Even if you genuinely believe that your ideas are much better than those of other camps (and I still believe that Dean was probably closest to the right guy to actually lead the country), no amount of explaining yourself to them is going to change their minds. You can’t lecture your way into office, no matter how much it seems like you probably should be able to. Genuine political change happens slowly. But what Dean did is put an idea out in the world. It entered the conversation. And instead of being the subject of a lecture, it stewed in the morass of American culture.

2. A quick lesson in the difference between us and them.

    My memories of my childhood, like many people’s, are fragmentary, but one of my most vivid ones is of a day when I was nine. There was a little neighborhood store not far from our house, and my mom had taken me there to do some shopping. They had a big stack of newspapers that they kept on a stand next to the front door. On the cover, a bunch of people were tearing hunks out of a giant concrete structure. When we got to the meat counter, my mom and the butcher had a lot to say to one another. I didn’t quite get it, but it piqued my interest — my best friend’s stepmom was from West Germany, and this news was about West Germany.

    This is the fall of the Berlin Wall, as I imagine you’ve already guessed. Over the next few years the Soviet Union collapsed — I still remember seeing the tanks on the news when the Soviet hardliners tried to take down Gorbachev — and Germany reunified. Yugoslavia literally Balkanized. We talked a lot in class about how if you bought a globe it might be out-dated by the time you got it home. (These were the days when you actually went to a store to buy things like globes. Weird, right?) I sort of half-understood it, but I found it all very interesting. And then it was (at least for us here in the USA) all over. Communism blew away like leaves in a warm autumn wind, leaving behind only detritus like Cuba and North Korea. (Yes, I’m aware that those two countries are not really comparable. This is about “Communism” more than it is about actual Communism.) By the time I was old enough follow electoral politics closely, the Cold War was a dead letter. Over. Done. We had won.

    Keep in mind, then, that people my age are probably the very youngest people who have any memory of these events at all. My younger brothers don’t remember the Berlin Wall. There are people who are old enough to vote now who were born in Bill Clinton’s second term — who aren’t old enough to remember 9/11. Communism is a fact of history to those people. You can no more frighten them with the spectre of Soviet aggression then you can convince them that Nazism poses an existential threat to Western democracies these days.* Hell, the first time I registered to vote, I think I listed my party as communist, with a small c. That was basically a lark, as far as I was concerned. It certainly struck no fear in my heart.

* NB that I believe we would all do well to be a little more worried about creeping fascism in our politics, here and abroad.

    For generations, the vague association of socialism with Communism has so tainted the discourse that the mere word “socialist” is held to be a deadly epithet in many circles. We’ve all heard it used as a weapon against Barack Obama — “He’s a socialist!” is a common refrain among the President’s opponents. But, notwithstanding the fact that it’s obviously not true, most of the people who grew up in a post-Soviet world respond to that accusation with this question: So the fuck what? Freed of the bugaboo of the USSR, the way in which American politicians got economic ideas all wrapped up with political and military ones, there’s a whole generation of people who can evaluate socialism for what it is, for how it has worked in other completely free countries. And a lot of them seem to think, Hey, not a bad idea. Irrespective of whether they’re right or not, these people can vote. And it would be a mistake to dismiss them as kids who will come to Jesus — a lot of them are adults, with jobs, families, and well-worn political beliefs, ones which don’t appear to be changing.

3. Are the kids all right?

    After the Iowa Caucuses this week, a lot of people noticed a striking fact: though Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton came in at something close to a tie — it appears that Clinton is going to win by a razor-thin margin — there was a startling, age-related breakdown in who their voters were: Sanders won 84% of voters under 30, 58% of voters between 30 and 44; Clinton won 58% of voters between 45 and 64; and 69% of the senior citizen vote. Because older people tend to vote more than younger people, this was just enough to carry her over the top. But the difference is notable.

    Explanations were many. On Slate’s Political Gabfest, David Plotz — who is generally a fairly reliable political realist, the kind of non-doctrinaire liberal who can see trends and admit when they’re going wrong for his side — ascribed the split to the idea that, more or less, college kids like to go where the excitement is, and Bernie Sanders is running a much more exciting, fun campaign than Hillary Clinton is. There may be a small degree of truth in this. But it’s also hugely reductive and — I think — largely incorrect. Jemelle Bouie, riding shotgun on that particular Gabfest, immediately pushed back, pointing out correctly that young people weren’t just voting the momentum, but voting for a candidate who was promising things they wanted: a stronger social safety net, the possibility of debt forgiveness, highly liberal stances on social policy. I’d go a step further, actually, and say that all Sanders really has is his cornucopia of leftist positions on these things; Sanders himself is a deeply uncompelling candidate, a haranguer, a grouch, a notoriously rigid asshole whose rhetorical style is not unlike that of many an eccentric grandpa the nation over. He’s not the kook that the Clinton camp would like you to think he is, but he’s not going to win you over with his personality, either. (This is one of several key differences between Sanders and Obama that I think render Sanders a non-starter as a general election candidate, but that’s not really what I feel like getting into here.)

    There’s a lot of anxiety among Democratic mandarins right now, who were surprised by Sanders’ rise, even if it hasn’t been quite as meteoric as his backers would have you believe. This is a version of what happened to HRC eight years ago, when Barack Obama rode a wave of youth and minority support to a stunning upset victory in Iowa and, ultimately, the election. The question is: does this speak to Sanders’ greatness as a candidate (as it clearly did with Obama), or some fundamental weakness in Hillary Clinton? That’s the question I keep seeing asked, over and over again, with the concern being that it’s about some weakness in Hillary Clinton that will cause her to collapse in the general election. (The mirror image of this is that Sanders supporters assert that he is so great that he will win a general election, despite the fact that a huge majority of the electorate simply doesn’t agree with him on hardly anything.) But I think it frames things all wrong.

    In reality, what’s going on is that wave that Obama rode into office is still pounding the beach, boom, boom, boom, as more Millenials become eligible to vote, and as they reach the age at which people become more likely to take part in the political process. If you’ll permit me to over-extend this metaphor, what it seems to me is happening is that Sanders is a far less gifted surfer than Obama, but he’s riding a better board.

    Barack Obama, despite what the right might have you believe, is not really all that liberal, or at least he hasn’t governed as though he is. His healthcare plan is a gross hybrid of warmed-over Republican ideas from 20 years ago, not some socialist plot to force grandma to commit suicide. He tacked gently into a pro-gay-marriage stance when it was clear something close to a majority of the country was already there. His judicial appointments are liberal but not crazily so. He favors free trade.** These are not the stances of a leftist. But he’s an incredibly gifted politician. He had the advantage of having clean hands on the biggest issue of the 2008 primaries, the Iraq War. He’s magnetic. If you vibe with his message, something about him pulls at your heart, every time he’s onstage or onscreen.

** So do I, just so we can get that out there.

    I think a lot of people misread his youth support, in a way that was not unlike how Plotz misread Sanders’ youth support in Iowa this week. Because Obama is so undeniably cool — and he is, handsome, thin, athletic, as comfortable with rap artists as foreign dignitaries — some people thought that this was why young people were coming out to vote for him. Clinton’s campaign has been careful not to get out-cooled this time around, doing things like enlisting the support of young female celebrities to appeal to younger voters. (Not very hard to be the coolest, when your opponents are [as my friend Isaac has put it] someone’s grouchy zayde and the villain from season 4 of The Wire.)

    But Obama is far more than that. He’s not just an inspirational figure, but an aspirational one. The kids who came out and voted for him could see their generation in him. He’s the son of an immigrant, a mixed-race kid raised by his white grandparents far from Washington, a guy who, through wit and skill and luck, rose to the very top of American society. He was not just a very American story (whatever Donald Trump might tell you), but an exceptionally 21st century American story. Nevermind that most of it took place in the 20th century. Millenials could see themselves in him, or what they wanted to be.

    And. Little though he turned out to be a leftist, he was the most liberal practical alternative in 2008. Had that not been true, would that youth vote have materialized for him in the way that it did? I put it to you that Sanders’ ability to capture a large chunk of the electorate, at least in the white and liberal parts of the country, is evidence that the answer is no. Sanders lacks all of Obama’s magnetism, his institutional support, his media mastery, his oratorical skill, and his personal narrative. That’s reflected, I think, in the turnout numbers in Iowa, which are slightly down from 2008. But he has a message that far better fits the audience. (One could — I have — call it pandering). It’s not a message that fits every audience in the Democratic Party. But it fits the young (white) people who vote for him, who have turned out to be far more liberal, far less afraid of socialism, and far more consistent in their views than anybody seemed to expect.

4. Some tentative predictions.

    Is this going to be enough to win Sanders the nomination? I gravely doubt it. Boomers still vote more than their kids. People of color have been slow to come around on Bernie, and though I can’t presume to speak for them, I share some skepticism about whether a guy who is maniacally fixated on income inequality really sees the ways in which racism in this country is about much more than money. There are still a lot — a lot — of moderates in the Democratic Party, but almost none of them have voted yet; this is part of being a big tent party in an age when your opposition seems hell-bent on driving everybody out who isn’t a white dude over the age of 40. And here’s the thing: though Clinton is stiff and seems old, Democrats on the whole still really like her. She does have the advantage of being the first woman ever to make a serious bid for the Presidency. This isn’t nothing. In fact, it’s a very great deal. Though Sanders might represent the future of liberalism in America, at the moment he’s still a factional candidate. It’s just a growing faction.

    If he does win the nomination, will he win? A lot of my friends are serious Sanders supporters, and I see a lot of them asserting that, not only can Bernie win, he’s the only one who can win, as though the passion they and their friends feel is somehow going to metastasize into the culture at large. (This is the “political revolution” the Sanders camp keeps talking about.) They will cite, chapter and verse, nonsense head-to-head polls that show Sanders doing better than Clinton against Cruz or Trump. (See here for a cold dose of reality about those polls.) All they know is, if Clinton is the nominee, they’re going to stay home / vote Green / move to Canada. They’re so blind with their love of his message, a message no one else has bothered to enunciate on this stage before, that they can’t see how hopeless it is.

    Because it is. Hopeless. Sanders is not the first, nor will he be the last, candidate to believe that he can turn out a huge swathe of voters who don’t usually vote but almost certainly agree with him. Hell, he’s not the only guy in this election promising to do that — there’s a billionaire from New York on the other side whose whole deal is appealing to disenfranchised working class white people who feel left out. The thing is that it doesn’t happen. I’m not sure those people exist. It’s true that there a lot of people who don’t vote in this country. It’s not a given that those people are natural Sanders voters. I suspect that just as many are natural Trump voters. He’s the one who has staked out political territory that has truly never been explored in this country.

    Sanders would be the farthest-left candidate since . . . at least McGovern, I imagine. And McGovern ran in a country that was far more comfortable with government spending and taxation and a lot of the things that Bernie stands for. What happened to McGovern? He got destroyed. He got destroyed as Mondale did after him and Goldwater did before him. He got destroyed as candidates rightly do when they stand outside the mainstream, hoping that through some form of transubstantiation the mere enunciation of their ideas will turn enemies into allies. Sanders is, as of this moment, way out to the left of the electorate. His destruction would be as inevitable as McGovern’s was.

    Not to say that Bernie’s wasting his time, at least in the long run. One thing he’s done is alert the Democratic Party to the fact that they don’t just get to have the young voters who have won them the last two elections; people (me included) have been talking about the demographic bomb that’s going off in this country without quite accounting for the fact those young, diverse, liberal people aren’t just going to automatically vote for the Democrat in every election. They might stay home. They might, given an alternative more compelling than Bernie, defect en masse to a third party, the way some people did when Ross Perot showed up. One way or another, they’ll have to be reckoned with.

    I suspect — though I don’t know for sure, obviously — that the Democratic Party of the future is the Democratic Party of Bernie Sanders, much more than it is the one of Hillary Clinton. Parties tend to act rationally. They end up where they are because they’re trying to get people to vote for them; someday soon, a person with Barack Obama’s charisma but Bernie Sanders’ ideas is going to show up, and show you can win with those skills and ideas. Just not yet.

5. An addendum.

    I’ve seen hand-wringing from all over the left that the Hillary-Bernie primary is getting too nasty, that HRC’s people are crapping on Bernie’s people too much and she’s going to lose them forever and hand the country over to Ted Cruz or Donald Trump or (more likely) Marco Rubio. And I suppose that’s not totally out of the realm of possibility. But it seems to me that this is pretty standard fare for primaries. Things got very nasty between Clinton’s supporters and Obama’s supporters as that campaign dragged on and on and on. Far nastier than they are now. The internecine battles of 2008 split not only along generational lines, but along gender lines, race lines, and none of those weapons stayed in the scabbard. A lot of Democrats tried to blame concern trolls and Republican spies for some of the uglier things that got said in that primary, but I suspect that’s mostly a way of resolving the cognitive dissonance. Which is the key. Somehow, everybody ended up back on the same team.

    The Clinton camp clearly thought that the secret to securing the nomination was to avoid getting sucker-punched by a more charismatic candidate again. They headed off Liz Warren at the pass. John Hickenlooper stayed home. Deval Patrick, too. A lot of people were bemoaning the lack of a deep Democratic bench of the sort the Republicans appeared to have. (I think it’s become clear that that turned out to be more of a clown car than a bench.) But the bench wasn’t shallow; it just wasn’t getting in the game. HRC’s people weren’t too worried about Bernie. After all, he’s even older than she is. How could he ignite the base?

    They’ve got a fight on their hands, now. It’s a fight they’re almost certain to win, but it’s a fight. And I think it’s probably a good thing they have one. Last time around, though she lost, Hillary appeared to learn a lot over the course of the primary. Early on she was stiff, emotionless, seemed a little surprised that anybody would ever give Barack Obama the time of day. By the end, she’d found another gear, one that incorporated both her pugilistic instincts and the fact that, at the end of the day, people wanted to see some humanity out of her, to understand that she was a woman as well as a politician. It’s been eight years since she ran for office, and it was clear early on in this campaign that she was rusty. Bernie’s challenge is doing a number of things, some of them more important than this, but part of what it’s doing is giving Clinton the kind of jolt that she needed, so that rust is less likely to be apparent come the dog days of summer, when she has to go toe-to-toe with the furious Trump, the oleaginous Cruz, or the slick Rubio.

    So good on ya, Bernie. Keep fighting. And to his supporters, I'd say: try to have faith that in the long run, your side will win the war.

On Not Feeling the Bern

    As a youngish white liberal from a substantial coastal city, I can tell you for a fact that I am in a minority in my cohort in one very specific way: I do not, as they say, feel the Bern. If one were to look at my Facebook feed — as I do, every morning, whether I want to or not — one might be misled into believing that Bernie Sanders, a grouchy old socialist from the middle of nowhere, has created an overwhelming political following, one of the sort that will almost certainly sweep him to a titanic, Reagan-like victory in November. The feed is filled with selfies taken at Bernie rallies, articles about Bernie’s authenticity, screeds about his righteousness, and a general celebratory mood that matches Bernie’s rhetoric (if not his rhetorical style) about creating a political revloution in America that will sweep in a new paradigm of small banks, universal single-payer health care, union jobs for all who want them, an end to free trade, and a bunch of other stuff that strikes me as basically incoherent pap. Bernie Sanders, whitest liberal of the white liberals in Congress, has managed the trick of convincing many white liberals that they are at the spearhead of a revolution, largely by appealing to our common feeling that we know better than other people, and that if we just explained to [WORKING CLASS CONSERVATIVES / TECHNO-LIBERTARIANS / BLACK DEMOCRATS / SECOND GENERATION LATINOS] where their interests actually lie, and how Bernie Sanders would be the best for their interests, they would all get on board.

    The idea is absurd on its face, of course. No one has ever won an election by telling people that they shouldn’t (or worse, don’t actually) believe what they believe, and they never will. This isn’t even about “telling it like it is”; in some degree one can get away with that, so long as it’s a part of a successful political brand. This is about telling people that what they think it is is actually not what it is at all — that evangelicals’ social beliefs are not more important than their economic ones, for instance. That’s what Bernie’s alleged appeal is based on. But that appeal only actually appeals to people who already agree with him. In fact, Bernie panders as much as (if not more than) anybody else. There’s a large enough faction in the Democratic Party that already agrees with Bernie that he’s able to build a substantial coalition that might (but probably won’t) win him the party’s nomination. But in the general election, Sanders would be faced with one of two options: changing his view on almost everything, or spending months upon months condescending to people who don’t agree with him. Neither one of those is going to work.

    The main reason position-moderation is almost certain not to work is that Bernie’s brand — and make no mistake, it’s a brand — is built around his status as an avatar of all that is authentic and incorruptible and therefore has been chased out of our political process, largely by big money.* Irrespective of whether you think this brand’s going to sell (I don’t), it’s what Bernie has to offer, and if he changes it, he’s going to lose the base that fell in love with him in the first place. He can’t tack towards the center the way almost every politician ever has, because tacking towards the center would be an acknowledgement that he is what he is: just another fucking politician, trying to get elected.

*NB that the money thing is both accurate and not accurate at all. One of the major phenomena of 21st Century politics has been the emergence of the superdonor — the most notable being the Koch Bros, though the left has its own, minor-league version of this, as well. The thing about superdonors is that they give massive amounts of money, not just in the interests of their own businesses, but in the interest of doctrinaire ideological positions. Sure, the Kochs might benefit from some of the policies they advocate, but really they’re so fabulously wealthy that the material change to their bottom line available in this kind of transaction is fairly minor. What they have is the luxury to demand — and receive — fealty to their favorite nutty ideas. In the pre-superdonor days, what was then styled Big Money was, in fact, kind of Medium Money, given by corporations and individuals who wanted specific policy changes, some of which were liberal, some of which were conservative, but all of which benefitted the bottom line. Those people don’t matter anymore. But at the same time, the thing that Bernie has going for him, and that B Obama had going for him before, was an incredibly activated base of small donors. But who are those small donors? I put it to you that, like superdonors, small donors are disproportionately likely to be very ideological: you don’t give $250 to a candidate as a small donor unless you really, really believe in the political ideology they espouse. Transactional politicians, the ones who practice the gory business of actually making the country move, do not inspire this kind of money to come their way in quite the same way, because, honestly — if you’re trying to pay your bills and get your kids to school, are you really going to take $250 out of your budget to give to a politician who’s going to agree to things you don’t like and compromise with people you hate? Probably not. In short, a politics with nothing but small money in it looks a lot like a politics dominated largely by superdonors. h/t to E Klein on Vox’s The Weeds podcast for framing this in this particular way on last week’s episode.

    And let’s be clear here: Bernie Sanders is just another fucking politician, trying to get elected. This was exposed a few weeks ago when people started talking about Bernie’s record on gun control, which is not as far left as his other positions. Why? Sanders’ response is that he comes from Vermont, which is a rural state, and blah, blah, blah . . . this is Sanders trying to pull a bait-and-switch on the kind of politician he is, really. There’s a sort of ontological question that hangs around the edges of debates like these, viz, Is it the job of a politician to reflect the views of his/her constituents, or vote their conscience? Bernie sells himself as the man-of-all-conscience, the firebrand truthteller who won’t be cowed by banks or other interests (viz his constituents), the Last Honest Man in Washington. But do you really believe that Bernie Sanders, of all people, actually has a commitment to the right of the people to keep and bear arms? Or is that just some bullshit he smears on the electorate because he knows they might vote for the other guy if he doesn’t? Yeah, me neither.

    See, it’s very easy to be the most liberal member of Congress when your constituency has roughly the population of Portland, Oregon. The last time Sanders got elected, he did so — in a landslide — with a grand total of about 170,000 votes; these are the votes of lefty, white Vermonters, for whom the only real break with standard lefty politics is on guns. It’s not exactly a road of trials to get these people to vote for an old, white socialist. If Portland somehow seceded from the State of Oregon, what kind of Senators do you think it would elect? White socialists? Would those guys be viewed as avatars of all that is authentic and truth-telling in the world, or just two more hipsters from the People’s Republic of PDX?

*

    There are other reasons that I don’t feel the Bern in the way that so many of my friends do. The first is that I don’t buy the idea that Bernie is going to create some kind of political revolution in this country. I’ve already explained why I don’t think that’s going to happen — why, in fact, it’s extremely cynical and condescending to believe that’s even on the table — but I also think it wouldn’t be good. I think political history, at least recent political history, shows that revolution tends to be very, very bad for a country. Sudden, radical change almost always gives birth to violence — both between factions, and from the state. Despite the fact that it doesn’t inspire much excitement or loyalty, incrementalism is a value — not worth fighting for, but worth preventing fights with. Can you imagine the fallout of a true revolution in America? In the current political environment, with the level of outrage and lack of cross-communication between different sorts of people, I can’t help but think that a Reign of Terror would follow revolution as inevitably as a flood follows the breaching of a dam. Much though I have fantasized about slapping around a Supreme Court justice or two, I honestly think that organized political violence is probably the most dangerous force in human history, and that playing with that kind of fire is liable to burn our house down.

    But really, and much less speculatively, it’s just that I don’t trust people who only have one opinion. And Bernie really only has one opinion: that economic inequality is bad, and solving that will solve the world’s ills. While I agree that economic inequality is bad, I don’t agree with the second part of that statement. To truly believe it is to apply a rigid rubric to every problem, in order to stave off thought, and shut down alternatives. That’s a recipe for failure.

    Bernie’s been tripped up by this on the campaign trail a couple of times. Does he really have the mental flexibility to navigate the maze of racial oppresion? I’m not accusing him of being a racist, not at all. But I don’t think that’s a problem you just magically solve if you solve inequality. For one thing, inequality will never, ever go away, and to believe it will is to buy into the fantasy of a perfectable society: so, if you don’t acknowledge the role that race has played in American history — including recent American history — you run the risk of “solving” inequality while once again leaving people of color, especially black people, completely in the lurch. (This is the objection I have to the older white liberals who fetishize how awesome everything was under Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. First of all, no, it wasn’t, we were involved in a huge war that killed tens of thousands of Americans and millions of other humans. But second of all, sure, maybe it was awesome to be a white person in mid-century America. It wasn’t that awesome for anybody else, so stop pretending that the policies of the New Deal are a panacea for everything.) For another thing, there are persistent effects of racial inequality that have very little to do with economic inequality — like, for instance, the difference in how white people are policed versus how black people are policed. You can be the richest, wealthiest-seeming black dude around, and there’s a fundamental level on which the state has been built, not to protect you, but to accuse you of being a danger to others. (Just ask tennis player James Blake.) There is a class of people for whom the weapons of the state are always pointed at their heads. Will Bernie’s one opinion — that economic inequality is bad — have a solution for that? I don’t think so.

    I was going to wrap this all up and put a nice bow on it, but I’m incredibly hungry and I have a slice of pizza here burning a hole in its plate. I think you guys get what I’m talking about, even if you don’t agree. I hope so, anyhow. #failingtofeelthebernifthatsokaywitheverybody

Some Complaints

Physical

Ankle, dull consistent pain, as of a tendon

Foot, left, numbness when running in new shoes

Foot, right, purple toenails tending toward falling off

Back, left, soreness, as of a bruise, but no bruise visible

    Sub-complaint: absence of wings

Eyes, both, vision noticably worse than just a few years ago

Hair, too gray, too long

    Sub-complaint: I don’t like going to the barber but I met a cute girl the other day and she         told me she was a barber at one of the local hip places but I can’t remember which one              and I risk going to the barber and leaving with only a haircut

Weight, too high as always

Political

Congress, intractability of

    Sub-complaint: the inexorable tendency of national parties to radicalize

    Sub-complaint: the untenability of nationalized party system without a parliamentary                 system in which it can work

    Sub-complaint: the heavily Republican character of my congressional district

President, current, imperfectly liberal on foreign policy

    Sub-complaint: reflexive assumption of liberals that free trade is evil

    Sub-complaint: radical militarism of said President’s opponents

President, future, lack of interesting candidates for

    Sub-complaint: Hillary Clinton seems like a perfectly competent person who would probably     do a reasonably workmanlike job as President, but her visceral distaste for the campaign trail     will probably cost her any election in which her opponent is not Donald Trump or Ted Cruz

    Sub-complaint: Bernie Sanders is a classic lefty stalking horse but his internet fans seem             to think there’s a conspiracy against him

        Sub-sub-complaint: being President is not about having perfect ideas

    Sub-complaint: Worry that Marco Rubio will be the last man standing on the Republican side     and will trounce Hillary Clinton in the general

    Sub-complaint: Donald Trump’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: Ben Carson’s ascendancy says worrying things about white people

    Sub-complaint: etc, etc, etc about white people

Gen X, conservatism of

Baby Boomers, conservatism of

Internet, tendency of to exaggerate offense and privilege outrage

    Sub-complaint: tendency of young internet commentators to demand ideological orthodoxy     (see also: Aesthetic complaints)

Aesthetic

Novel, mine, lack of faith in ability to complete

Jonathan Franzen, continuing outsized fame

State of criticism, its consisting mostly of political fault-finding and condescending Stalinism         masquarading as liberalism

The Bugle Podcast, declining quality / possible cancellation

Harmontown, extreme decline in quality

The Americans, not currently airing

Superheroes, their vapidity and omnipresence

Geeks, their fetishization

Austism, its fetishization

Classic rock, its continuing domination of airwaves and restaurant playlists

Sporting

Oregon Ducks football, terribleness

Seattle Mariners, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: unwillingness of some M’s fans to admit this

Boston Red Sox, terribleness

    Sub-complaint: ditto

Tennis, no more majors until January

Tennis, domination of Novak Djokovic

    Sub-complaint: Andy Murray’s inability to break out completely

    Sub-complaint: Rafa’s injury woes

    Sub-complaint: Roger’s inability to beat the Djoker

Tennis, racism in

Cricket, my inability to buy a baggy green hat

Basketball, how much less interesting it is to watch than play

Arsenal, ongoing futility

Personal

Impermanence, insistent feeling of

Singleness, persistence of for the last few months

    Sub-complaint: Inability to stay with one person for more than a few months. I swear to             God, I am not your garden-variety committophobe. Or am I? I actually don’t know.

Boredom, consistent

    Sub-complaint: embarrassment over feeling bored

Social anxiety

Existential

I AM GOING TO DIE ONE DAY

Short and Stupid: My other blog

Hey y'all -- realize I've been a ball-dropping bitch on the subject of this blog the last coupla days. I was gonna write one called "The Agony of the Feet" today, about the vicissitudes of running, but I just don't have it in me today.

Instead, I'm going to link you to my other blog: Politicians Giving the Thumbs Up.

A while ago, I realized that politicians, as a class of people, give the thumbs up way more often than any other class of people on earth. I almost never give anyone thumbs up; it's just not a gesture in my physical vocabulary. It's not in many people's, really. But politicians do it all the time. In fact, since starting the thumbs-up blog, I've discovered that that was more true than I had ever before understood.

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The Governator with his thumb.

There do seem to be certain politicians for whom the move isn't natural -- notably, I haven't been able to find anybody from Idaho or Nevada -- but the thumbs up appears to cross most cultural bounds. It's endemic among American and British politicians for sure (the two thumbsie-upsiest politicians in the world appear to be UK Prime Minister David Cameron and US Vice President Joe Biden), and it appears to be common throughout the English-speaking world: there are plenty of Canadian and Australian politicians who have been photographed giving the gesture as well.

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Mark Rutte, PM of the Netherlands, giving the international sign for "I am positive, trustworthy, and happy. You should vote for me."

But it transcends national boundaries. Now and again I've decided I need to find a politician from a non-US/Commonwealth country giving the thumbs up, and it has rarely been a challenge. The Presidents of Argentina and Brazil flash it often. The PM of the Netherlands is an enthusiast of the gesture. So is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Edrogan.

So far, the world's two largest countries have evaded my attempts. It may be that India and China lack a culture of the thumbs-up -- I'm sure that's true in many places. But it may also be that I haven't looked hard enough yet.

The Reddit Thing, Pt 2: What Does Ellen Pao Have to Do with Donald Trump?

    It’s hard to nail down the demography of Reddit’s userbase. As with anything that gets covered by the media, reports tend to coalesce around the spectacular: a survey from four years ago found that 78% of Redditors were men, 21% were women, with the remaining 1% some combination rounding error and people who don’t fit neatly into either category. Others suggest numbers closer to 60% men.* Either way, it’s overwhelmingly male. This is something I can attest to from my experience using the site. It’s common to presume that the person you’re communicating with, whether it’s about A Song of Ice & Fire (/r/asoiaf) or visually stimulating maps (/r/mapporn), is a guy. This is a correct assumption often enough that when you get corrected,** you notice it.

* Last time I wrote about Reddit, I said the website had “fewer than 100” employees; this website claims that, as of April, it actually had just 74.

** doesn’t happen to me anymore, because I am just that virtuous

    This manifests in a number of ways, a lot of them basically harmless. The level of crudity is high in many (but not all) subreddits. Subreddits — non-porn, non-exploitative — dedicated to things like “pretty girls” (/r/prettygirls) and “girls smiling” (/r/girls_smiling) are substantial (/r/prettygirls has more than 100,000 “subscribers”, ie, people with accounts who wish to see popular posts from the subreddit on the front page when they log in; this number is in line with ones you see for cult TV hits like Archer or Community). But, like any monoculture, it can get toxic, especially in the parts of the website where men take steps to sequester themselves from any women. In these places, like /r/mensrights, users will claim not to object to women — but a culture of fear and disrespect festers, and it manifests as a weird sort of mutation of the English language, one in which the weight of various words is altered to match a set of shared assumptions that underpin a lot of the paranoia and loathing manifested in those places. And unfortunately, these places bleed. This lingo, and these attitudes, radiate outward into other parts of the website, where they win converts and / or cause conflict. There is no mechanism by which Reddit can prevent users of ugly subreddits from wandering into other ones to spew their invective, at least not given the tools they currently employ.†

† There’s actually a distinction to be made, I think, between subs like /r/mensright, and others that are dedicated to really loathsome content. In a way, /r/mensrights is more insidious than really disgusting subs like /r/coontown (I imagine you can guess what that’s about), because it cloaks its agenda in a veneer of respectability, not least because of that lingustic metamorphasis they’ve managed to effect. The distinction is not unlike that between the KKK and Richard Nixon’s use of racial dogwhistles to appeal to people’s ugly instincts in order to get elected.

    I’ll give you three examples. Whole disserations could be — probably are being — written about this, but in the interest of quasi-brevity, I’m going to limit myself to these three.

    1. Feminist. This word has developed a distinct derogatory flavor among people who frequent /r/mensrights and similar subs. This is not dissimilar to how liberal came to be code, in the conservative discourse of the 90s and early 00s, for “everything I hate about America, including but not limited to effete latte-drinkers who want to take my money, black people who want to take my money, Hispanic commies who want to take my money, and gays, who want to take my children.” In many respects, feminist has become divorced from the meanings it has for most people, many of which are strongly positive and are largely about strength, assertiveness, and making the world a better place for everybody;†† in this context, it means a fun-killing ninny who views it as her job to lecture, censor, and oppress men. Feminists, in this formulation, seek to deprive men of sexual pleasure by reclassifying sex as rape, sexual imagery as fostering rape culture, and harmless flirting as harrassment. The feminist is a bugaboo, and to call someone a feminist in this context is to reclassify anything they say as hopelessly agenda-driven and not really worthy of listening to.

†† This is the big thing that I think a lot of people miss about feminism, among many other activist movements. They’re not about stealing happiness or well-being from anybody; they’re about creating new happiness and well-being, and a world with more happy and well people in it has a tendency to be a better world for everybody.

    2. Social Justice Warrior. Now, on the face of it, social justice warrior sounds like it might be a good thing, right? Wouldn’t you classify, say, Mother Teresa as a warrior for social justice? Gandhi? Rosa Parks? But in this context, these three words have been weaponized, to form a mocking appellation that is similar to, but not the same as, the above mutation of feminist. Social justice warriors (SJW’s, in the parlance of our times) are people who are hyper-sensitive to matters of race, class, and gender, and prone to getting their “fee-fees” (viz feelings) hurt by basically imaginary injustices they perceive everywhere. SJW’s are weak, silly, and they are definitely, definitely, wimps. That they tend to be women and people of color, well . . . them’s the breaks, I guess? I’ve never really been able to wrap my mind around how people can just rationalize away the fact that so many of the people who might perceive injustices that white guys don’t also might have a unique insight into the matter, but there you have it.

    This is maybe the most complicated of these because there is a sense in which people sometimes use identity as a cudgel with which to beat people with whom they disagree. I recently had a conversation with someone — someone I’d just met but who I generally really liked — in which she asserted that “empiricism is a weapon of white supremacy.” And there are ways in which empiricism have been used in that manner, or least the pretense of it has ben. But there are many ways in which empiricism is potent weapon against white supremacy, and that mostly sounded to me like someone who didn’t like being proven wrong and so had found a way to try to get people who had proven her wrong to shut up.

    This is maybe the most complicated of these because there is a sense in which people sometimes use identity as a cudgel with which to beat people with whom they disagree. I recently had a conversation with someone — someone I’d just met but who I generally really liked — in which she asserted that “empiricism is a weapon of white supremacy.” And there are ways in which empiricism have been used in that manner, or least the pretense of it has been. But there are many ways in which empiricism is potent weapon against white supremacy, and that mostly sounded to me like someone who didn’t like being proven wrong and so had found a way to try to get people who had proven her wrong to shut up.

    But at the same time, I was able to understand this as a function of human psychology, rather than a symptom of some reprehensible social disease that was threatening my freedom as a white dude. Social justice warrior is more than an acknowledgement that there is a culture of censorious PC-ness that has gotten out of hand. It’s a label meant to demean.

    3. Misandry. This is meant to be a parallel concept to misogyny — ie, the hatred of men by women. The word was coined more than a hundred years ago, but it’s now become one that shows up in the discourse, almost entirely between men talking to men who agree with them. It’s the kind of thing that I’m sure exists somewhere, a little bit. But the word has entered the frenzy that is places like /r/mensrights and is now used to describe an allegedly common social problem that, as far as I can tell, hardly ever really manifests. Massive discrimination against men by women doesn’t really happen all that much, and furthermore, isn’t all that realistic — because, in nearly every culture on every corner of the planet, it’s mostly men who control the levers of power. Even if Hillary Clinton is elected president next year, that will be true. 

    What’s insidious about this mutation in the language is the way in which it, and the assumptions about the world it represents, can seep into the brains of people who don’t know any better and poison their attitudes. I know a kid — well, he’s 27, but I’ve known him since he was 15, so he’ll always be a kid to me — anyway, I know this guy who I hadn’t seen in a few years, and when I ran into him again, he had a lot of these words in his mouth. It was shocking to me, but he seemed to view it as totally normal. I’m not really a believer in the domination of the sign over the signified — in fact, it seems often preposterous to me — but when we’re talking about social constructs like gender, class, and race, it can happen.˚ Ultimately, it turned out that this kid — a straight, white guy, a product of the middle class and with a college education — mostly hadn’t gotten laid in a while. I can’t help but think that this is where a lot of this stuff originates: guys, especially white guys, who have struck out with the ladies, and feel better if they believe there’s a conspiracy against them.

˚ That said, it can also be a distraction. See my earlier post about “the n-bomb”.

*

    Ellen Pao! Where is she? We’re not there yet. Because now there’s some stuff about race.

    It’s a little harder to keep track of Reddit’s racial breakdown. Maybe it’s not harder to keep track of, but there are fewer publicly-available statistics about it than there are about the gender breakdown. The sources cited above do indicate that white and black people are about equally likely to use Reddit, and Hispanics are almost twice as likely to do so — but they don’t break down absolute numbers, and they don’t include other ethnic categories, as far as I can tell. But it’s a safe bet that Reddit is overwhelmingly white. Maybe as overwhelmingly as it is male. Why?

    Well, Reddit’s userbase is overwhelmingly American, and — despite what Donald Trump might have you believe — white people still form something close to a supermajority in the US; according to recent census statistics, nearly 64% of Americans are non-Hispanic white people. Furthermore, Reddit skews towards the following people: (1) college students; (2) people with college degrees; (3) people with a lot of free time; (4) people who can afford an internet connection. Every single one of these categories, in one way or another, selects for white people, either in the US or outside the US. It’s also an almost-entirely English-language community, which again selects for white people, inside or outside the US.

    Okay, so what? In some degree, for reasons that I leave the reader to parse out, I’ve been less attuned to this matter than to the matter of gender.*** But, much as the assumed user of Reddit is male, so is he white.††† During my brief tenure working on the podcast Upvoted by Reddit, I worked on an episode of the show dedicated to an interview with /u/mach-2, an African-born, British-educated Redditor who had some cogent views on the topic. One of the things he talked about in that interview — conducted by Reddit co-founder and board director Alexis Ohanian — was Reddit’s “fuck black people mode”.

*** I mean, I get it, I’m white, and that means that I have to pay closer attention than do non-white people in order to perceive the everyday dynamics of race. But I’m also a dude: I’m genuinely asking, why is it easier for me to see the gender stuff on Reddit (or in life) than it is for me to see the race stuff? Is this common? Is it more a matter of having attuned myself to it younger? Is it because I know lots of women but only a few non-white people? (I do live in Portland, after all.) Is it because race is so goddamned touchy in this country that those of us who have the privilege of ignoring it are more prone to doing so?

††† Or Asian-American. Asian-American men are common enough in tech, I think, that white people tend to assume that they possess a sort of co-majority status, an honorary whiteness. But that is a huge can of worms that I am not willing or qualified to open up at the moment. It’s worth noting that one of Reddit’s former CEO’s, Yishan Wong, is an American of Chinese ancestry.

    As /u/mach-2 described it, Reddit’s “fuck black people mode” tends to kick in a day or two after a high-profile incident of racialized violence or protest; it closely mirrors racial attitudes you see throughout American society, and not just on Fox News (though most obviously and unapologetically on Fox News). It’s highly complex, but it boils down to three things: (A) heavily biased portrayals of events, ones which tend to paint black people as violent and / or criminal and ignore the constructive and peaceful things black people might do in response to things like police violence; (B) a tendency to blame black people broadly for allegedly responding badly to incitement (viz, “why are they looting their own businesses?!??!?!?”); and (C) highlighting individual black people who validate these views by apologizing for the behavior of their fellow black people in public.

    In common with the coded language of the Men’s Rights Assholes (ahem, activists), this has the insidiousness of avoiding obvious epithets and overtly nasty rhetoric of the openly racist people in places like /r/coontown, while simultaneously propagating an image of black people as somehow uniquely irresponsible, stupid, or criminal. Especially to Redditors who don’t have a lot of exposure to black folks outside what they see on the internet, this could be both influental and hugely destructive.

    Of course, this is just one aspect of race on Reddit — the one I’m most familiar with. Because, like a lot of white Americans, I’m used to thinking of race as a kind of binary, in which there are black folks, white folks, and everybody else kinda doesn’t count. (I’m working on that, by the way.) But there’s a generalized anxiety about race on Reddit that mirrors the generalized anxiety among white people in the country as a whole.˚˚ Take, for example, this: on the subreddit /r/mapporn, where I hang out a lot, every time there’s a thread about a map concerning anything to do with American Spanish-speakers, or the ancestry of Americans, or anything that might hint at immigration, you’ll find comments carelessly throwing around the word illegal as a noun, implying that America is terribly threatened by immigration, and worse. Usually these are massively downvoted, but they’re there, every single damn time.

˚˚ And I’m sure you’re getting defensive about this, dear white reader, as I tend to when I read similar sentiments. Try thinking about it this way: every time you think, “Hey, man, not all white people are anxious about increasing diversity in America!”, remember that nearly every person of color has thought this a hundred times about a sweeping generalization that has been made about them and people with similar skin tones.

*

    Ellen Pao! We finally got there. What does Ellen Pao have to do with any of this stuff, and what does any of this stuff have to do with Donald Trump?

    Well, as you might of guessed from her name, Ellen Pao is neither a guy nor white. She is completely American — born in San Francisco in 1970 — but her parents immigrated from China, and, like a lot of first-generation kids, she speaks two languages. She also holds a degree from Princeton, and two advanced degrees from Harvard. In almost every respect, she’s someone who has done a hell of a lot that many people would never dream of even trying to do. And a huge, vocal part of the Reddit userbase hates her damned guts.

    Why?

    Some of it really does have to do with those decisions we talked about in my last post, about banning controversial subreddits and firing Victoria Taylor and so forth. But Pao wasn’t the only one who was in on those decisions. Some reports indicate that Alexis Ohanian, her boss and a Reddit founder, was the real force behind at least some of them. Pao was just the one who was burnt in internet effigy for her crimes.

    Look, I’m not here to argue that these decisions were executed well. It’s clear that Reddit management was not only no good at communicating with its customers, but had not really thought that hard about trying. But Pao ended up on Front Street with all of them — in part because she was the CEO, and in part, I think, because she touched a lot of the Reddit userbase’s gender and race buttons.

    See, before Pao became the interim CEO of Reddit (and interim was always part of her title), she was most notable for a lawsuit she brought against her previous employer, Kleiner Perkins, a venture capital firm where she worked for seven years, from 2005-2012. This lawsuit was almost reverse-engineered to press buttons on that vocal, sexist subset of Reddit users who give the place a bad name: it was a gender discrimination suit; it alleged that the discrimination was due in part to a sexual affair she’d had with a married coworker; and — and — she lost it. She lost it in spring 2015, just before The Reddit Thing started happening. And she lost it in the middle of a shitstorm about sexism in tech and gaming that struck right at the heart of a lot of Reddit’s userbase.

    What this all boiled down to was that when the Reddit admins started banning subs that traded largely in racist and/or sexist material, Pao was ready-made as a target. Her picture was all over /r/punchablefaces (where she had been featured even before The Reddit Thing, for losing her lawsuit, and where the most popular post of all time calls Nancy Grace a “cunt”). Pictures, coded with Men’s Rights language, depicted her as “Chairman Pao”. Ellen Pao was at the top of a lot of people’s shitlist on Reddit, and whether or not any of them would cop to the reasons, a lot of them were expressing their distain in distinctly sexist and racist ways. This exploded all over again when Victoria Taylor was fired and the users went into revolt. Pao was threatened with death. Board members, even in announcing her resignation, felt obliged to defend her. While the vast majority of people who used Reddit didn’t participate in this kind of thing, a lot of very loud users did.

    What does this have to do with Donald Trump? In some degree it’s about the response of white people to finding themselves in a situation in which they feel attacked. The response is almost a form of counter-insurgency. To be clear, not all — maybe not most — white people respond this way. But in a world dominated by a white, male point of view, being presented with challenges to that can be frightening for people. I’ll be honest and say that sometimes my initial response to challenges to a status quo that benefits me is rejection. It can be really hard to parse out the different levels of one’s response — how much is this about genuinely thinking that people are damaging the discourse by hitting a mute button with PC bullshit, and how much is this about not liking to be held accountable for actions and systems that mostly serve to make you feel good? It’s really hard to say.

    But Donald Trump, at least these days, mostly traffics in appealing to people who are unapologetic about their fear and hatred of the other — which is the role that Latino immigrants fill for Trump and the Republican voters telling pollsters they’ll vote for him, and Ellen Pao serves for the overwhelmingly white and male users of Reddit who want to string her up. And that — that is what Ellen Pao has to do with Donald Trump.

(And now I'm out of energy for the night. I've been writing this for nearly two hours.)

A short film about the Cuban Missile Crisis, from The Armageddon Letters.

On Eating Politically #2.

This is a short post, a preview of something I’ve been thinking about writing that probably won’t see the light of day till next weekend, when I’m slightly less busy.

But: It’s funny how quickly I’ve become an evangelist for vegetarianism, only six weeks after jumping back into it after years away. Its advantages seem so many, not least of which is that meat is expensive.

On Dickerson, Wallace, Nonfiction, and that Whole Postmodernism Thing.

I was going to write this as an open letter to my favorite political reporter, the redoubtable John Dickerson, of CBS, the Slate Political Gabfest, and right here on Tumblr*. The reasons for that will probably become a little more obvious as we proceed, but let me pause here to explain what it is about Dickerson that I like so much.

*It appears Dickerson hasn’t updated his Tumblr since late September, which makes sense — things have been hot and heavy on the campaign trail the last three months, and if you listen to the Gabfest, you know he’s spent most of that time in Iowa and New Hampshire.

My main exposure to him is through the aforementioned Gabfest, on which Dickerson plays a sort of neutral wonk as foil to the more advocational Emily Bazelon (Slate's law expert, and my totally inappropriate online crush) and David Plotz (Slate's big cheese, in essence). Bazelon and Plotz are both bright Ivy League sorts with appropriately liberal-ish attitudes about things for East Coast Press Types. (Plotz has a certain contrarian streak — with which I can identify — which occasionally causes him to take slightly more conservative opinions than his co-workers do — with which I can also identify). They're sort of intermittently convincing and irritating, in the way that people who agree with you loudly frequently are, and a good portion of the show is given over to one or the other of them making an impassioned argument about one thing or another.

Dickerson, on the other hand, very rarely advocates a position on policy matters. His fundamental mental instincts tend toward fairness and neutrality. This may be a matter of training (Dickerson, 43, was a bit of a wunderkind and has been reporting on national politics practically since he could walk); but it seems to me more a result of some kind of wiring that causes him to see all sides of every issue and to resist the human instinct toward confirmation bias. A typical exchange on the Gabfest consists of Plotz & Bazelon advancing impassioned, learned arguments in favor of one position or another, followed eventually by Dickerson posing a question that cuts to the heart of the issue but which remains essentially un-answered by the impassioned and learned arguments which have been brought to bear. When he does take a position on something — it’s almost never something political that Dickerson takes a position on, but rather something ethical or moral, some kind of Big Question as embodied by the public life of one famous American or other — his understanding of the issue at hand tends to be one or (usually) both of the following:

(A) Totally unexpected;

(B) Overwhelmingly convincing.

The man has that rarest of gifts: the ability to have thoughts that are both new and true.

Anyway. I’ve been reading DFW*’s Consider the Lobster, a book of essays & reportage in which DFW discourses on subjects as various as the Academy Awards of Pornography and John Updike**’s reprehensible Toward the End of Time. Perhaps the most pivotal piece of reportage in the whole book, the one which made Wallace’s name as a nonfiction writer and captured the zeitgeist in a way that even Infinite Jest did not, is “Up, Simba”, an 80-page monster that began life as a Rolling Stone article about John McCain’s strange, and strangely disappointing, run for President in 2000 — the year Little George Bush swept to the Republican nomination and then fundamentally hijacked American democracy, with a thousand tragic consequences.*** For a brief, shining moment, it seemed as though McCain might have the heft to inject a little honesty and accountability back into American politics, and part of the mystique of that moment is almost certainly the fact that Wallace, that totem of American intellectual liberalism, seemed to have been caught up in that strangeness.

*David Foster Wallace, if you need to be reminded

** Wallace accurately anticipates that a person of my age would despise John Updike, which I do, because he’s narcissistic old fart, and a sexist to boot. Also, I’ve never once read one of his books and thought, Oh, hey, that’s me. Not that that’s the only project of fiction. But it’s clearly supposed to be one of the things you do when you read one of his books. He typifies a great deal of what was loathsome about 20th Century America: its self-absorption, its relentless maleness, the way even its more beautiful achievements feel kind of pointless.

***An interesting counter-factual is not the usual — What if Al Gore had been President on 9/11, as the law and the voting public clearly indicated he should have been? — but one implicitly posed by a piece like “Up, Simba”, which takes McCain’s 2000 campaign so seriously†: What if John McCain had been President on 9/11?

† And since we’re writing about DFW again, perhaps we should do the footnotes-within-footnotes thing again: The seriousness with which DFW treats McCain’s (failed) 2000 campaign is made both profound and ridiculous by the 2008 presidential election, in which McCain was nominated by the Republican Party, in what cannot help but seem like an act of self-flagellation, viz., “We’re so sorry we nominated that shit-for-brains 8 years ago and he ruined everything!” But then McCain, when put on the big stage, turned out to be such a pathetic case, unequal to almost every task required of him, that he was slaughtered by a black kid with a funny name and no experience. Would a McCain-Gore contest in 2000 have been that kind of bloodbath? Was the problem in 2008 that McCain was too old, like a prizefighter who has taken too many blows to the ol’ noggin? Was it that Bush had so slaughtered our taste for war that we couldn’t elect a veteran? Was it the old Clinton adage, “It’s the economy, stupid”? Was it simply that we were so desperate to feel good about ourselves that we needed to elect the black kid with the funny name and no experience? (Who, by the way, if your tone and irony detectors are malfunctioning, I voted for once and plan to vote for again, and not because he is a black kid with a funny name.)

I’ll be honest: I haven’t finished reading “Up, Simba” yet, because as I was reading it, occurred to me that I had heard John Dickerson make reference to being on the bus with McCain’s campaign that winter, and my interest was piqued: DFW was largely shut out of official access to McCain on that campaign, as he describes it, because he was a reporter for the notoriously liberal Rolling Stone, and (as he acknowledges in an forward to the piece) he wasn’t a reporter trained in the back-scratching and lever-pulling required to gain the proper access. The piece displays an overt antagonism toward more mainstream reporters, most specifically a group Wallace refers to as “The Twelve Monkeys”, a collection of highly professional reporters for big, national news outlets. I’m fairly sure Dickerson was working for Time, which is the very definition of a big, national news outlet. So I found myself wondering: was Dickerson one of the Twelve Monkeys? Wallace’s portrait of these guys is so nasty — they come off as privileged, corporate, snooty**** — that I had a hard time picturing him as one of them.

****Wallace describes one of them actually shoving his bags into Wallace’s hands at a hotel, as though the estimable author were nothing more than a witless dogsbody.

The upshot is that I Googled the phrase, “David Foster Wallace John Dickerson”, just to see if Dickerson had made any comment about the piece or his role in it. The first thing I found was a Facebook post from the Gabfest's page on which Dickerson said he “had issues” with Wallace, which sparked a maybe-kinda memory of listening to an episode of the Gabfest on which he said something similar. And then I found this Salon article, in which it becomes clear that Dickerson was one of the Twelve Monkeys, and in which he is quoted as having written in an email about the piece, “I remember there being a lot of things that were just made up … and often made up to bolster the narrative (which is different than just remembering something wrong).” Part of what he was objecting to, to be sure, was DFW’s characterization of the Twelve Monkeys, who are made to seem arrogant and uniform, all men in business suits stooging about — which Dickerson claims is incorrect both in terms of the gender count and the dress code (he in fact says that characterization was probably fair of him, but not many of the other Monkeys.)

[PLEASE READ THIS INTERPOLATION AT MY OTHER BLOG, INTERPOLATIONS}

So: this has left me with a conundrum, and several attendant questions about the nature of truth and nonfiction, some of which are especially poignant right now because in my program there’s a heavy contingent of nonfiction MFA’s who don’t really seem particularly committed to the idea that nonfiction has to be, in any meaningful sense, true. First, the conundrum:

Can I continue to read “Up, Simba”? This isn’t really a moral dilemma so much as a practical one. As a veteran of The Moth, I am familiar with the instinct to fictionalize memoir in an attempt to make it matter more; I will confess to having done so, on stage, in front of hundreds of people.***** What it really comes down to is that, having had some details thrown into doubt, I’ve had a hard time believing … really anything about the piece. Because, ultimately, I have a lot of trust in Dickerson, and it’s not blind trust that one has in an authority, but the kind of trust that is built through years of experience of another person’s trustworthiness. Dickerson is an eminently fair, and profoundly intelligent, person, and I’ve come to trust his judgements pretty solidly. If DFW is, for lack of a better word, lying, then what interest do I have in continuing to read his alleged reportage?

*****But I never claimed to be a reporter, either. At least not at The Moth.

Then there’s the other stuff. One of my personal friends is a woman who TA’d a class with me last term, a woman I like a lot, who is getting her MFA in “nonfiction”. She claims to be essentially unworried about the ways in which nonfiction and fiction blend together. In the class we taught, the professor who led the lecture, an essentially worthless and irresponsible “intellectual” whose whole agenda was the pursuit of the kind of reactionary liberalism that gives academia a (well-deserved) bad name, kept referring to one of the books we read — a book which made no bones about the fact that it was an act of autobiography — as a “novel”. This annoyed me so much that I dedicated several minutes in my classes to talking about the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, where we draw the line, and what that all meant. When I brought it up with my friend, she said (roughly), “Well, I’m a nonfiction MFA, so you can understand how I might not be so concerned with that.”

I’m sorry, but what? Shouldn’t the people who write nonfiction be MORE concerned with the line between fiction and nonfiction? That’s how it seems to me. If what you do is allegedly the relation of not just truth but fact, it seems like you ought to feel equal obligation to both. (Ahem. You can tell I’m getting worked up by my application of BOLDFACE CAPS.) If the alleged purveyors of fact are so in thrall to that postmodern notion that there is no such thing as authority, what right have they to say that they’re writing nonfiction? What makes the “memoir” tag anything but a marketing gimmick? I’ve written a lot of fiction, and I can’t remember the last story I wrote that didn’t require a very great deal of research. Does that make what I write “nonfictional”?

I find this all very troubling for a couple of reasons:

(A) This woman is a good friend of mine, and very intelligent, and if people like her aren’t thinking about these matters, then nobody probably is.

(B) DFW is himself one of the great idols of American “nonfiction”, and his rejection of fact in favor of narrative, which seems to be pervasive, throws into question essentially everything that has been written in that cause. (It also makes me wonder about “Big Red Son”, his essay on the Academy Awards of Pornography, by the way.)

And as much as we can all bleat about the evacuation of Objectivity and all that shit — and DFW is a hero of a great number of people who are prone to this kind of farting about — the truth is that even DFW himself doesn’t really believe in this, as anyone who has closely read “Authority and American Usage” could attest. On some level, this whole SNAFU means that “nonfiction” is nothing more than a marketing concept, and getting an education in its concoction seems to be a disaster of recursive idiocy. It makes me sad to say things like this, but it seems irrefragable, at least to me.

The funny thing is, it doesn’t really compromise my reading of some of the pieces in Consider the Lobster, which are explicitly about the memory of events, as opposed to reporting the facts of them. (This is the kind of thinking that I wish my nonfiction friends would pursue a little more assiduously, because I think they might come up with some pretty interesting ideas.) “The View from Mrs Thompson’s”, DFW’s piece about 9/11, remains heartbreaking — and ultimately useful, because all writing about trauma, particularly one as big and public as 9/11, is ultimately about memory as opposed to reportage, meaning that it’s blurry and beautiful and sad and terrifying and ultimately unresolvable.

And I guess that’s what I come down to, in the end. If you want to claim something is nonfiction, you have two options: make clear to everybody that it is a piece, to some degree, about memory, meaning that you’re allowed some of the prerogatives of fiction but that you also have to abandon the prerogatives of nonfiction, to wit, that what you’re saying is perforce true; or to actually report what happened, and not manipulate your records to match your memory. Because otherwise? You’re just lying.

The Occupy movement learned how they deal with unrest in California last night.