84: No hero

Tearing down the idols that stand in our way

Sutton Hoo ship-burial helmet, c. 600-650 C.E., The British Museum

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“I understand the appeal of superhero stories, but I think they are problematic on a couple of levels. One is that they are fundamentally anti-egalitarian because they are always about this class of people who stand above everyone else. They have special powers. And even if they have special responsibilities, they are special. They are different. …

But another aspect in which they can be problematic is, how is it that these special individuals are using their power? Because one of the things that I’m always interested in, when thinking about stories, is, is a story about reinforcing the status quo, or is it about overturning the status quo? And most of the most popular superhero stories, they are always about maintaining the status quo.“

This is a quote from science fiction author Ted Chiang, from a recent interview with Ezra Klein that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately (yes Ezra Klein my favorite podcast that I never stop talking about). My childhood comic book brain initially started flipping through mental long boxes and thinking, well actually that’s not the case there are a lot of superhero stories where they go against the status quo, sometimes the state or big corporations, but you know what, I am not trying to get into the business of defending superhero comics in this newsletter. Some of them I like, most I don’t, and as with any self-respecting fan of comics, I’m usually either conflicted or annoyed by the genre and its dominance in popular media.

And in broad strokes, Chiang is right about superheroes. While they often begin as underdogs, the core of most superheroism is some form of genetic or otherwise inherent exceptionalism (the super part) and a reliance on that exceptionalism for the good of the masses (the hero part). And while the best ones are usually subversive storylines that chip away at that concept, the general theme of your typical superhero story is fighting crime, eliminating an aberration, protecting the norm. When you consider the fact that four of the highest grossing films of all time have the word “Avengers” in the title, you have to wonder why that kind of story clearly appeals to us so, so much.

Fanboys often point to the universality of these themes, making the college freshmany observation about the “hero’s journey,” which has been frequently dismissed as an overgeneralization of the world’s folklore. There’s also something distinctly American about the superhero fantasy. The idea of exceptionalism is so ingrained in our own national identity that it’s an astoundingly non-controversial political opinion that America is, in fact, just plain better than the other nations in the world.

You can see our obsession with superhero stories in lots of areas of American life if you think about it, but Ted Chiang’s observation also made me think wow, this sounds a lot like he’s talking about billionaire philanthropists (also some of our superheroes are literally billionaire philanthropists). In my very first newsletter ever I pointed out that Americans actually did not always love the idea of wealthy philanthropists, at least not as an institution, but we are coming out of a long modern period in which wealthy donors were largely considered an almost purely benevolent force in society. Ahem.

We are now, perhaps, emerging from that period, and when historians look back on when it became official, they may point to the fall of Bill Gates, which now seems to be underway. For the record and to say I told you so I have never been a big fan of Bill Gates. I don’t even really like writing about him to be honest but here we are again. Not that I had some inside information that he is a total creep, which, to a degree we will no doubt discover soon enough, he appears to be. But mainly because the very existence of Gates as mega-philanthropist and the foundation he built with his now estranged wife Melinda French Gates (see above, to the right of Bono) struck me and many other longtime haters as a problem in and of itself. Gates represents so many of the aspects of big philanthropy that many are no longer willing to tolerate.

For one, the main justification for philanthropy within democracy is heterodoxy in how we deliver public goods. But when private wealth and philanthropy can grow to the size of something like the Gates Foundation, it accumulates the power and monolithic prescriptiveness of the state (or at least our worst characterizations of the state) but without any of the democratic guardrails. Even beyond the power carried out by their actual funding of this or that, they gain a special kind of authority on any number of matters and are looked to to solve any number of societal problems guided by their own particular worldview. This class of people who stand above everyone else.

As an extension of that, big philanthropy is frequently guilty of prescribing solutions that either reinforce or at least do not threaten the status quo. So aside from the wrongness of a private citizen with the authority of a Bill Gates, I usually find myself disliking the solutions he puts forward themselves, because they tend to favor the hierarchies that gave him power in the first place. That includes pushing innovation and global markets to make agriculture more resilient through monocropping, school reform funding focused on uniform standards and assessment, and his unshakeable faith that new technology is the only way we can mitigate and adapt to climate change.

While there’s been a lot of criticism of Bill Gates over the years, like many philanthropists, he still somehow retained this glow of overall goodness in popular culture. Even if you disagreed with some of the things he said or approaches he took, you couldn’t deny all the good he’s done for the world. Whenever Gates fired off some random comment on something he has zero expertise in, you could always count on a wave of fawning media. We saw this most recently with his book and press tour about climate change, which was generally treated as the latest assessment from one of the world’s foremost experts on the topic.

I guess there’s a chance Gates emerges from the current scandal intact, but the general consensus is that the aura of goodwill is already gone. One of his fiercest and earliest critics, Linsey McGoey, says it’s long overdue, not because she celebrates the Gateses’ falling out, but because of the freedom from superheroics that it grants us.

“The best thing to come out of a sad event like this divorce is recognition that today’s global problems are ours to tackle, we the people — interdependent, global members of the public — through solidarity and shared science. We can’t relinquish this task to unaccountable philanthropists. The age of deference to them is over, and it’s about time.”

Climate change is the biggest of those global problems that is ours to tackle, not to be left in the hands of ordained saviors, but the desire to leave it there is strong. In the 2020 Democratic primary, we had perhaps three climate superheroes to contend with, all of them white men, two of them billionaires. We love the idea of the “good billionaire” like that guy from Contact, who descends from the skies to use his powers for good, be it Tom Steyer or Mike Bloomberg, or Elon Musk delivering us electric cars but just in case plotting an escape plan to Mars. In my second ever newsletter I argued that, even if they use their riches in the best most effective way possible, we will always lose something important when billionaires are our climate heroes, in that they take the problem and the solution out of the hands of us lowly mortals.

It’s not just wealthy mega-donors, though. When the climate movement began to grow exponentially, including record-breaking demonstrations around the world in 2019, there was an inescapable narrative that this was the work of a single young Swedish girl. How remarkable that one teenager could set in motion such an uprising, people would say, the youth shall save us thank god for the youth. We should know better because Greta Thunberg herself constantly tells us that she and her generation are not here to save anything. She, like the millions of other climate activists, is just a person who wants to have a future.

We often elevate our elected officials to superhero status in this way too, with one hateful piece of shit in particular being the most obvious example that comes to mind. But so often in politics, or I guess to be more precise, in the popular portrayal of politics, the elected leader taking office is often seen as the endgame, you know, when we finally get the infinity gauntlet back and then spoiler Iron Man dies. Not only that, but voters and activists’ allegiances to these leaders are expected to be unwavering and absolute. Once you pick the person, that’s your person, and if you turn on them or doubt them or criticize, it’s seen as a failure or a comeuppance. Ahaha the left is eating itself you see look at these stark divisions that have been revealed a rift you might even say.

We saw this recently here in Massachusetts after tons of young organizers went to bat for Ed Markey in 2020, as the reliable progressive and climate champion faced a primary threat, weirdly from the center. Known as the Markeyverse, they are believed to have played a large role in his reelection, which sent a wave of fear throughout the state’s Democratic establishment. When Markey’s stance on Israel and Palestine let these generally leftist supporters down, they went after him for it.

Pundits and political operatives took delight in this, characterizing it as a lesson for these naive young people about politics. But you know what? Fuckin good for them. Really, we could all learn something from the Markeyverse, and the ease with which they fought their own hero. Because at the end of the day, they were never in it for Ed Markey. Their devotion didn’t lie with his name, or his face, or his hair or his cheugy sneaker fashion. It was with their own ideals and their own political goals.

This is why I make it a rule to never stan a politician. Not because they are inherently bad or unscrupulous people, but because they exist to serve, to act as a stand in for the people who put them there. They are a conduit for power and change, not the change itself. A coalition of Latinx and Native organizers were instrumental in putting Kyrsten Sinema in office, because she offered a better path to change than the Republican alternative. And now that she is failing to deliver, the coalition that put her there will remove her. Or if she starts to come through, maybe keep her there.

One of the core principles of Sunrise Movement‘s electoral work goes: No permanent friends. No permanent enemies. That sounds kind of foreboding, but I’ve always found it to be admirably zen-like. “Our only permanent allegiance is to protecting our communities, our shared home, and our future.” You might add to it, no permanent heroes. Which is not to say there are no people we admire or turn to for help or even model ourselves after. It’s not to say we can’t enjoy the next Spider-man movie. But we might challenge our devotion to the idea of superheroism, which can rob us of our own power and prevent us from tearing down the idols that are standing in our way.

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Links

• “People are going to wake up the next day and go to work, and take care of their kids, and live their lives, and democracy will be gone. There really won’t be very much that we can do about it.”
• “America’s democratic experiment may well be nearing its end… However it plays out, the G.O.P. will try to ensure a permanent lock on power and do all it can to suppress dissent.”
• Eversource, the utility company that was caught waging a campaign against electrification and in defense of natural gas was now caught distributing pro-natural gas propaganda in Massachusetts classrooms. These fuckin guys.
• A “cataclysmic day” for fossil fuel companies.
• Gizmodo has had some pretty good climate headlines lately: Shareholders Tell Exxon to Eat Shit
• It’s taken so long to extend the Green Line to low income neighborhoods, that when it’s finally done, low income people will have been mostly forced out of those neighborhoods.
• “People are forgetting that restaurant workers have actually experienced decades of abuse and trauma. The pandemic is just the final straw.”
• In 2020 as millions of low wage workers lost their jobs, median CEO pay at New England’s largest companies soared 21.4%, to $14.5 million. GE’s CEO Larry Culp brought home $73 million. The national ratio of compensation between CEOs and their workers was 21-to-1 in 1965; by 2019, the ratio was 320 to 1.
• Arizona’s attorney general is bringing eco-fascism to mainstream US politics. “It is shocking to see what was in the El Paso shooter’s manifesto described in more legalistic language in this suit by the Arizona attorney general.”

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Watching

Film festival continues. Fans of crime fiction will thoroughly enjoy I’m Your Woman, which is a pitch perfect 1970s neo-neo-noir thriller, but told from the perspective of characters who might have otherwise been supporting characters.

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Listening

Goat Girl, A-Men

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Welp in other news looks like we are about to run fresh out of democracy and UFOs are fully real. On a more personal note, it is a motherfucker of an allergy season out there. One of our aged little dogs Jacoby has also taken to waking up at 3 in the morning and wanting to just hang out and have fun with us for a couple of hours. Jamie thinks it was the full moon but I think he has dementia. Either way it has been a tough week sleepwise so I’m going to play some Zelda and call it a day.

I hope you all have a nice holiday weekend take some Claritin and watch out for UFOs.

Tate