Tate Williams

I am also a we—social contagion in modern horror

‘There is no such thing as disunity.” –The Empty Man, 2020

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Fam I have been feeling a little sick the past couple days don’t worry it is not COVID I took a test and PASSED. I am soldiering on though as this week’s newsletter is an absolute must not because of stuff happening in Congress or whatever, but because it is Halloween. That’s right, it is time for another Haunted Palace, in which we plumb the depths of human terror so if you have a heart condition or bladder or bowel control issues, you might want to skip this one. It’s going to get scary.

For a quick recap, in last year’s installment we talked about the horror of your environment turning against you in a little ditty called The Uninhabitable Beach House, and in the very first Haunted Palace, we ventured to the Arctic to feel the frigid, howling terror of humanity’s unceasing urge to explore. This year, we’re going viral, but not in the way you might expect. Ahead are spoilers for The Empty Man, Midnight Mass, Block Island Sound, Satan’s Slaves, and the video for the Radiohead song “Just,” but I will give you a heads up before the worst spoilers.

‘I am also a we’

There was a short-lived science fiction TV series called Sense8, created by the Wachowskis and J. Michael Straczynski with writing credits by award-winning novelist David Mitchell. As the credentials suggest, it was a great show, but it never really caught on, probably because it was super weird, almost aggressively earnest, and also maybe a year or two ahead of growing tolerance for fluidity of gender and sexuality. The basic concept is that there are these eight characters living all over the world and they have this psychic connection, so they feel each others’ sensory experiences and emotions, can communicate with each other, and lend each other their unique skills (you know, like computer hacking skills, martial arts, good driving, etc) depending on whatever they are going up against.

There is this line featured prominently in the second episode, which also serves as the episode’s title: “I am also a we.”

It’s deployed in a literal sense at first, as one of the characters Nomi, a trans woman played by Jamie Clayton, is describing the strength she draws from solidarity in the queer community, knowing that she is not acting alone. But it becomes kind of a mantra for the whole show, as the eight main characters act as both individuals and one entity. Thematically, and you may get where this is going, it applies to all of us. Because all of our actions are guided by and bring consequences for people around us, we are all simultaneously an I and a we.

It’s such a simple, beautiful notion and I get kind of weepy if I think about it too much, and this sense of unity is played, to my recollection, as nothing but a form of power and exuberance in the show. It is a celebratory notion that shatters the day-to-day illusion of isolation.

But lately, during my annual mainlining of a very different kind of genre fiction, I have been seeing a recurring portrayal of a film negative version of this idea. That is, the terror of being a we, both for the fear of the I’s dissolution, and a fear of the power of the crowd. In The Empty Man, for example, barely audible whispers compel masses to annihilation. In Mike Flanagan’s Midnight Mass, we see faith-as-disease drive a tight-knit community to burn itself down. In Block Island Sound, signals from the sky turn salt-of-the-Earth Rhode Islanders into puppets who sacrifice their progeny to the sea.

A chill hang in The Empty Man, 2020

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This is an idea within the horror genre that has deep roots, and is historically a portrayal of an invading other. In mid-century America, during Cold War and Red Scare hysteria, it featured in many horror movies and books, most notably Invaders from Mars and Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

In this modern iteration, however, I think something else is going on. It feels less like xenophobia or paranoia about the threat of socialism, although our cups runneth over with both. I’d say it’s more the product of a growing feeling of vulnerability as global crises make our interconnectedness impossible to ignore and strain the tension between the individual and the collective. Our nerves are exposed, and people are feeling a general unease at the I’s loss of primacy, and how the we might turn on us in the face of societal decline.

‘At one time we were one; we will all be one again‘

The Empty Man, a 2020 film based on a comic by the same name, was marketed as a teen urban legend story, and didn’t do very well upon release, but got a second wind on HBO thanks to word of mouth. As such, it is far from what I expected. A horror epic (overlong and overstuffed, to be honest) that mutates into like three (four?) different movies, the best way I can describe it, thematically is what if Buddhism but evil.

The premise is that a formerly dormant psychological contagion that is spread through whispers and thoughts makes its way from a cave in Bhutan all the way to Missouri, where—very roughly described—it spawns a doomsday cult that is turning young people to suicide when they come to the conclusion that there is no self. “I came to tell you, I found something so wonderful and so freeing, and it’s helped me to realize that nothing can hurt you because nothing is real,” moody teen Amanda tells our main character James.

The cult, although not explicitly, worships a perversion of Buddhist concepts, that we are not separate from everything else in the universe and only the release of ego can end suffering. “There is only the great, binding nothingness of things. At one time we were one, we will all be one again,” says Stephen Root, stealing the show as always in the role of cult leader. But they take this belief to a nihilist conclusion, and we learn [SPOILER] that the protagonist is not even a person, but a tulpa, an imagined creature willed into being and controlled by the cult. “You’re not your own man, you’re our man,” Amanda reveals at the end. “And isn’t that really what you want in the end anyway? So just let go.”

The terror of the self as a puppet is the concept at the core of Conspiracy Against the Human Race, a pessimist philosophy book by horror writer Thomas Ligotti, who says that our deepest fears derive from the reality, which we mostly ignore, that we are simultaneously conscious beings and automatons activated by some ceaseless animating imperative.

As a species with consciousness, we do have our inconveniences. Yet these are of negligible importance compared to what it would be like to feel in our depths that we are nothing but human puppets—things of mistaken identity who must live with the terrible knowledge that they are not making a go of it on their own and are not what they once thought they were.

Fun stuff! That same feeling in our depths is represented in The Empty Man, but with the twist that the abyss the main character stares into is generated by the crowd—spread through ideas transmitted by this cosmic force they call The Empty Man. It all reminds me of that amazing Radiohead video [spoiler for a 25-year-old music video] where the man is lying frozen on the sidewalk and a growing crowd begs him to tell them why he is stuck there, and when he does, they too must lie on the sidewalk with him.

The Empty Man gives us a similar terror of the dissolution of the ego, instigated by other people. If you think you know who you are and why you do what you do, in other words, think again.

This may remind some of you about a couple of past issues on the idea of behavioral contagion. The economist Robert H. Frank argues that governance must take into account, not self interest as our chief motivating factor, but social factors that can yield positive or negative outcomes. Look at the statistics on the behaviors of the people in our web of social connections, and you’ll see that individual actions are strongly influenced by community, contrary to Americans’ frontier values of independence and self-reliance. In biology too, we see a growing field of study that entire species are subject to needs and offerings of other species in their ecosystems.

Just as in the case of “I am also a we,” this can be an invigorating concept, seeing the individual as part of a great continuity. It reflects Rousseau’s idea that we gain our freedom and humanity by joining with others to decide how we all want to live, rather than as a servant of instinct and self-interest. But this can also be a source of tremendous anxiety for the ego. If I am also a we, then what if I am not even an I at all?

Submission to a higher power

While The Empty Man‘s social contagion occurs through cosmic thought waves, in 2021’s Midnight Mass, it occurs through something that will be far more familiar to many of us—church.

I will say up front that your mileage will vary with Mike Flanagan’s work. I think he’s a master of using horror as emotional metaphor, but his apparent belief that his audience is far too dumb to figure out that metaphor on our own makes long stretches of his shows borderline-unwatchable exposition.

Nevertheless, his work always packs a punch eventually, and the last few episodes of Midnight Mass really do pay off, [SPOILER] and he pulls together this brilliant allegory of a small Catholic church on an island fishing village that, in an attempt to return its residents to their imagined glory days, converts them all into bloodsucking vampires. This is carried out by a well-meaning priest, brilliantly overacted by Hamish Linklater, who starts slipping the congregation vampire blood in the communion wine.

Father Paul that is clearly not an angel that is a vampire bro.

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The great thing about Midnight Mass, if you survive the unceasing monologues trying to pass as conversation, is the portrayal of participation in community as a powerful and necessary act, but one that if tainted can lead its participants to carry out horrific acts. It’s the dual nature of unity, which brings salvation and self-forgiveness to our main characters, but also [SPOILER] leads a lot of nice people to drink rat poison, be resurrected as vampires, and burn all their neighbors’ houses down.

I feel like I don’t even need to specify all of the ways we have watched the destructive impulses of a poisoned community unfold in our own lives during the past few years. But we can start with white men marching with tiki torches chanting “you will not replace us,” an authoritarian mob attacking the Capitol based on the gospel of a stolen election, online right wing radicalization, and the refusal of basic public health measures during a pandemic, heavily correlated with political ideology.

The many crimes of organized religion are also well documented, although I am usually not all that interested in fiction about conflicted devotees or disgruntled takedowns of the church. But I was moved by the way Midnight Mass handles faith, respecting it in many different forms as a path to love and healing.

Being part of a community requires that faith, whether religious or not. The most selfless and often the most difficult acts people take—forgiveness, trust, non-violence, service—all involve some kind of risk to the individual. In that sense, being in right relationship with the people around you is, whatever your belief system, a form of submission to a higher power, something bigger than you. That act is so strong and so powerful, but it also requires vulnerability, and when tainted can bring disastrous outcomes.

Disaster poisons the crowd

So assuming I’m right that there’s this underlying anxiety surrounding the relationship between the self and the communal, you won’t be surprised to hear that I think a big part of what is driving it is the background din of global crisis, specifically public health and climate crises. One thing Midnight Mass has in common with the indie horror film Block Island Sound, and last year’s featured fright The Beach House, is that the horror takes place amid environmental chaos. And for some reason, filmmakers’ go-to indicator of environmental chaos is dead animals. [CW: dead animals]

In Midnight Mass, one reason the island community is in such a state of degradation is that some years ago there was an oil spill that poisoned the surrounding waters and destroyed fish populations. There’s also a wild cat infestation on the island that takes an unsettling turn when, as part of the vampirization of the town, the entire population is wiped out, leaving dead cats littering the beach. In both cases, there is a looming sense that the natural state of the island is in disarray.

In Block Island Sound, which takes place on an actual island that we once went to on vacation in the off season and it honestly was a little scary, there’s an otherworldly presence that is driving main characters to black out, wander off in the middle of the night, and bring animals out to the sea on a fishing boat where they inexplicably disappear. There are also mass die offs of fish and birds.

Our main characters are in a similar state of financial vulnerability as the villagers in Midnight Mass, and there’s the same sense of a natural order thrown into disorder. And again, the main characters are turned into puppets by some kind of alien communications from the sky, at one point blamed on the offshore wind turbines that the real life Block Island Sound is regionally known for.

Part of the horror of the film is intergenerational menace. The original villain is the main characters’ father, a craggy-faced oaf who, upon his death, returns as a terrifying spirit from beyond, compelling his son to carry out the same bizarre behavior that led to his demise.

[SPOILER] Eventually the son turns on his young niece, in a puppet-like state, taking her out on the Sound where she will inevitably go the same way as all of the missing animals. This familial violence combined with environmental collapse reflects another fear that runs through all of this horror of social contagion, and that is, how are we going to treat each other when the world that we are familiar with starts to fall apart?

Climate scientists have always been clear that, scientifically, we have the capacity to beat climate change. What they express far more concern about is how humans will behave in response to the growing threat. There is strength to be found in the communal, but how might crisis poison the crowd?

We know from COVID that an environmental threat can turn us into both heroes and monsters. It became almost immediately clear how group behavior gone haywire could directly impact our own fates. Climate change has already brought about tremendous unity and strength, and in other cases, horrific treatment. I think that’s an unspoken backdrop in a lot of horror right now—how we will treat each other when things start to get bad.

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From watching these movies or reading these little reviews, it may be tempting to see all of this as an anti-collectivist message, that the moral is, see you can’t listen to other people or next thing you know you are kidnapping your neighbor’s dog or you find out you’re just a tulpa created by a doomsday cult. But I think it’s more complicated than that.

I read it more as a global extension of another long-running horror trope—the Freudian concept of the uncanny, or if we want to be fancy the German unheimlich, which means something along the lines of “not home-like.” Basically when something is similar to a familiar or beloved entity, but in a slightly fucked up way that makes it extremely unsettling.

I will reference one more movie I watched recently which is Satan’s Slaves, an amazing Indonesian horror film in which a Satanic cult is trying to steal away the family’s youngest son, who is this adorable little kid who everyone loves so much. A scholar tells them that the cult will be unable to take the child away so long as the family’s love for each other remains strong, and they all hold him close and refuse to give him up.

His friends are demons.

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That seems to work, but then late in the movie [SPOILER] there is a twist and the scholar is like oh shit I translated something wrong, actually your son is not even your son he is the son of Satan and he’s going to stab you and then happily run away with the cult. And the family’s love for him is wrecked in this devastating way.

These stories of social contagion are like that story on a grander scale. It’s an uncanny version, not of familial love, but of love for humanity. The strength and joy in community, poisoned.

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Listening

As is tradition, here is my Spooky Scary Spotify playlist which gets a few tracks added every year. Please enjoy:

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Watching

Drawing October’s scary movie binge to a close this weekend, and if you did not get enough from the above, all of which I would recommend my cranks aside, here are a bunch more. Some really good ones this year. Here they are in order of best to worst:

• Satan’s Slaves
• Malignant
• Tragedy Girls
• Autopsy of Jane Doe
• The Empty Man
• Freaky
• Conjuring: Devil Made Me Do It
• Sleepwalkers
• Block Island Sound
• Nightmare on Elm Street 4
• Midnight Mass
• Black Christmas
• Interview with the Vampire
• Nightmare on Elm Street 3
• V/H/S 94
• Super Dark times
• Classic Horror Story
• The Wind
• Strangers: Prey at Night
• Body Bags
• Summer of 84

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Reading

I feel like horror fans and non-horror fans alike will enjoy the short stories of Argentinian journalist and author Mariana Enriquez. Her Things We Lost in the Fire was one of my favorite books the year it came out and the same can be said of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed this year. She writes about teenage misbehavior, political violence, superstition, and much more. The horror of social contagion looms very large in many of her stories.

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That’s what I got for this year Scoobies. I hope you enjoyed it and you recover from your shuddering before too long. If you celebrate the dark arts, have a nice Halloween tomorrow. Give out some candy, play some spooky music, watch a scary movie.

For most of our relationship, Jamie never watched scary movies with me because when she was little she saw The Shining and was so scared she had to sleep on her brother’s floor for like a month. But then all of sudden she decided she wanted to try to watch some scary movies. So we gradually started watching them, and I usually stuck with kind of artsy, tasteful stuff but she said I like these movies but you know what, none of them are very scary. She asked me to come up with some truly scary movies to watch this weekend. So I’m breaking out the big guns and last night we watched Terrified, which scared the shit out of me but she was like, not very scary sorry.

She says it’s because she’s been watching gross murder shows as her form of relaxation for so many years, but I think I just have to find the right poison. Might try The Exorcist or get into some Takashi Miike if I’m desperate. Otherwise I don’t know it’s possible she might be an actual murderer I guess I’ll find out either way.

Boo!

Tate

‘A world in which there is room for many worlds’

Death and Life, Gustav Klimt, 1915

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Well I asked and you delivered. I didn’t really know what to expect when I decided to do a reader participation issue. The response could have been complete crickets and I would have 100% understood. I don’t even like to open emails, much less respond to them, much less fill out an accompanying survey with essay questions for god’s sake. But a bunch of you were up for it, and I am very grateful.

For starters, I learned a lot about your interests and preferences. I was encouraged that most people don’t seem to mind the length, although I’m sure that’s kind of a self-selecting sample. I was surprised to learn that there’s a lot of interest in philanthropy. I don’t know why I’m surprised, considering that was the primary focus of this newsletter when I started it. But I’ve written about philanthropy since 2014(?) so I usually have an itch to write about different stuff and probably project that onto readers. Clearly there is a lot of interest in how billionaires and wealthy foundations are impacting the world right now, and that will always be a thread in the newsletter. Also a lot of interest in housing, which I totally get.

I also got a lot of extremely helpful suggestions. One theme was that people seem to like the interviews, and want to hear more voices in the newsletter, including from grassroots organizers, people working on just transition, and people from local politics and community organizations. I could not agree more, and in the next phase of CP, I’m going to be doing more reporting and Q&As mixed in with the essays. This has always been something I wanted to do more of, but have had to balance it with time and money concerns. Going forward I’ve freed up a little more space to focus on that kind of thing, which I’m really looking forward to. Always open to suggestions of people I should talk to.

The responses to the writing prompts were so thoughtful, honest, insightful. Full of things I also feel deeply, things I had never considered, and topics I now want to write about. And finally, some much appreciated recommendations of books, music, movies, podcasts, TV shows and more that I will list below.

Also, I’ll do the drawing soon and get in touch with the winners about their winnings. If you didn’t get a chance to respond, you are still more than welcome to. I’ll leave the form open and may include straggler responses in future emails, although you won’t make it into the drawing sorry but there are rules in life.

Thanks again to Tamiko for the inspiration, and Jamie for helping me figure it out. Here we go!

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Prompt #1: Do you feel like the world is on fire?

Literally or figuratively. How do you feel climate change impacting your life? What other related crises (democracy, inequality, structural racism, housing, transportation, health, etc) do you feel bearing down on you? What emotional response is this bringing up—anger, rage, motivation, energy, grief, dread, anxiety? Who or what are those emotions directed toward?

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I think about climate change basically all the time. I vacillate between existential dread and hope that we can avoid the worst. Oh and sorrow that my children are going to live in a world that will be more and more disrupted by climate crises for their entire lives.

David Rogers

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I live on an Ionian island and sooner or later we’ll literally burn up—the scars of past wildfires are all over the olive groves and pines near here—and sooner or later we, too, will have to contend with wet bulb 35 events.

But meanwhile we installed heat pumps and plan to install solar electric (the energy company offers the option for buying 100% renewable electricity, but we’d like to also have our own system to power our own little electric car for when the main cable from the mainland goes down). Emotionally, I find some semblance of balance walking the dogs and soaking up the incredible beauty, the warm people’s vibes, but I basically agree with someone (Ada?) who suggested we’re all doomed, and some of us are more doomed than others. (Editor: Indeed it is from Ada, or Ardor by Nabokov)

The other day I spoke with a wealthy man who is planning a massive marina for super-yachts since there are hundreds of them floating in the neighborhood looking for a place to park. But it will be a green marina—they won’t be able to idle their engines while docked but will be hooked up to the solar electric system. How’d it make me feel? I had to laugh… and dust off my old copy of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Marko di Bello

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I always imagined climate change would happen really quickly one day, culminating in a major catastrophic event where many millions of people would die. I understand now that it’s a slower unraveling, and there are people who will always be able to shield themselves with money and power, people who will never be impacted in a serious way. But there are more of us than there are of them, and in my good moments I think it’s that shared humanity, the desire to live a meaningful life without causing harm to others, that will save us in the end.

Jamie Cerretti

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Yes. And the interconnectedness of all those related crises you list makes me waver between a greater despair and the positive notion that some good progress on any issue will impact many others.

Eric Swedlund

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The alarm is blaring, the doorknob is hot, and the smoke is starting to come in from under the door. What makes it truly terrifying are all the people telling me to just wait for the firefighters to come save us.

Josh Cerretti

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It feels like the conversation about the world being on fire is more present than ever. But the reality is that it’s becoming more of an apathy engine than I would like to see. Too many people either throw their hands up and say oh well, or too many people willing to martyr themselves for the cause. Then there are the often forgotten people who are being ground down by the very system in front of us and don’t have energy, time, or shouldn’t be expected to do much more than they’re already doing unless we’re willing to fight for them. Migrant and incarcerated workers, single parents with multiple jobs or just one grueling one, marginalized people, status insecure or unsafe people, etc.

What I would like to talk more about is sustainable movement ecology. Movements for change and justice are hard but martyring ourselves for the cause is making the decision that it’s okay to recycle the idea of expendability into our movements. No one is expendable, we are all valued and necessary members of society, anything less than that may fall short of a radical vision of the future. And we’ve got plenty of entities working hard to have us fall well short of our goalposts.

Michél Legendre

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Yes, the world feels very on fire. I feel a sense of dread most of the time that I haven’t ever felt before. Dread about what comes next, about not doing enough, about living in this world as a whole person.

Theresa Warburton

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I feel like climate change and capitalism has had an impact on my decision not to have children. There is a sense of hopelessness around it, and an end of the world feeling. But it also encourages me to enjoy the beauty of what we have now and be kind of selfish with my time and my life. I flow between anger and anxiety and ambivalence with all the issues facing our country specifically. I have trouble balancing being super active and angry and removing myself from all of it to a hopeless “fuck it all” state of mind. The anger and anxiety is directed at big, dark money, extreme capitalism, and white supremacy. Basically a lack of empathy from society as a whole, which was born of and is fed by the above.

Amanda McDaniel

Prompt #2: What do you want to build in the next world?

What are the elements of the future world you want to see built or help build? Innovations, infrastructure, community resources, social bonds, organizations, businesses, economies, government agencies—whatever. What actions do you want to take in coming years, individual or collective? What are you excited about? How are the problems discussed above shaping your work (either your job, your art, or volunteering)?

~

Like the zapatistas said “a world in which there is room for many worlds.” Too many visions of the future assume we would all like to live the same way.

Josh Cerretti

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Lately I’ve been thinking about the phoenix, and what it looks like to prepare to transform and rise from the ashes of the fire. There’s a group of queer BIPOC that I’ve met online and we are talking about what skills and resources we need during the “great unraveling.” We’re thinking about what it looks like to build small communities across the country that are both self sufficient and connected to each other—queer communities grounded in radical values.

As you’ve said in this newsletter, the way we will survive, and maybe thrive, is by being connected to the people we are in community with. I am thinking a lot about what that looks like in practice, and all the different circles of community I am part of. How do we learn to take care of each other and rely on each other. That will be how we rise from the ashes, I think.

Tamiko Beyer

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I often ask organizers, people in the movement, friends in general what would they do if money didn’t matter and we weren’t expected to work to live. And so many people answer with “work” that would be with their hands. I think there’s something fundamentally human that so many people would do art, woodwork, be farmers, care for people through different mediums, make clothes, but don’t because it’s not seen as a career or sustainable or they have movement work to do.

I want to start building the world where we can fall into joy when we win. Like when we finally roll this boulder up the hill and fall over out of exhaustion, the ceiling that’s collapsing to replace the floor is that world where people can just be. Be in existence, be in their own manifestation, be in community, just be.

Michél Legendre

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I hope we can shift our focus from punishment to accountability, justice, and reparations. So many of the problems we are currently facing seem rooted in our unending thirst to put Black and Brown people in cages or control every aspect of the way they move through the world. I envision a world where true reproductive justice is realized, which requires abolishing the carceral state and ensuring every single person has the ability to choose if, when, and how they parent.

Jamie Cerretti

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What I’m excited about is a project that plans to map the world’s human population into about 100,000 segments of fewer than 100,000 people using existing boundaries, and then characterize the risks and opportunities of each, develop tools to help convey and upgrade/update those characterizations, and then see how many of the ~100,000 “metacommunities” might be engaged through their schools and local orgs to “globalize” their communities, networking with others with the shared vision of leaving no community behind.

Marko di Bello

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Would love to see public education become the heartbeat of our communities, teachers to be respected as professionals and seen as essential to the future of the country. Free college. I support organizations who are working at local political levels on legislation, by sharing their work or giving them funds, helping get the good ones elected. As cliche as it is, I believe the children are our future. They give me hope, we just need to get out of their way at times. Getting more and more old white men out of public offices.

Amanda Williams

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Whatever brings a greater equality between people will have the most lasting and positive impacts.

Eric Swedlund

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I want no more police!

Theresa Warburton

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I want a world where fossil fuel companies no longer exist. And I’d like a relatively healthy democracy where folks’ minimum basic needs like food, water, shelter, clothing, education and health care are guaranteed.

David Rogers

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I’d like to build a world without billionaires.

Pat Wood

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Here is one thing that I wrote this week

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Reader Recommendations!

Jamie Cerretti:

• We Ride Upon Sticks by Quan Barry

Pat Wood:

• I’m very into books that re-frame our relationship with each other, the natural world, death, the universe, etc. And books that push against the dominant narrative around competition, capitalism, human exceptionalism, and our dominion over nature. Soul of an Octopus, How to be Animal, The Overstory, Finding the Mother Tree, Until the End of Time.

Eric Swedlund:

• TV Shows: Lodge 49, Reservation Dogs, Stranger Things, Get Shorty, Bosch
• Music: The Beths, Hiss Golden Messenger, Jason Isbell, Waxahatchee, Lydia Loveless, Khruangbin, Micah McKee
• Books: James McBride – Deacon King Kong; Luis Alberto Urrea – The House of Broken Angels; crime/mystery series from Tana French, Joe Ide, Attica Locke, Jo Nesbø, Michael Connelly, Alex Segura, Joe R. Lansdale, and more.

Marko de Bello:

• Foundation, the Apple TV series, is a beautiful disaster, and the premise of trying to establish a foundation to reduce the dark ages from 30,000 years to 1,000 years is a timely one.
• Woman at War, the Icelandic film about a woman fighting an aluminum plant, dodging drones and shorting out power lines by shooting wires over them, is a minor masterpiece.
• But my current obsession is anything recent by Andreas Malm, especially podcasts and How to Blow up a Pipeline.

Josh Cerretti:

• Book: How to Hide an Empire by Daniel Immerwahr
• TV: The Lady and the Dale
• Movie: Jennifer’s Body
• Podcast: All My Relations
• Articles: “The Dead Internet Theory Is Wrong but Feels True”
• Music: Lil Nas X “Montero”

Theresa Warburton:

• This Land (podcast) is great.
• I’ve really been enjoying Brothers on Three, a story of a basketball team on the Flathead Reservation.
• Slothrust’s new record is really getting me through right now.

Michél Legendre:

• I love the IDLES band they are incredible. Raw emotion and fun.
• I’ve also been really getting in touch with more Afro-diasporic music: Francis The Great, Do 7 band, Lord Beginner, Mighty Dougla, Roy Ayers, Sons of Kemet.
• More music: Kojey Radical, Joy Crookes, Appleby, Oompa (shoutout Boston), Arma Jackson, Oscar Jerome, Miraa May, Bakar, Tonina – Calypso Blues, Shungudzo – It’s a good day
• Poetry: Porsha Olayiwola, Tamiko Beyer, Jericho Brown
• Books: anything Amitav Ghosh, bell hooks – The Will to Change, Teju Cole – Open City

Amanda Williams:

• Ted Lasso – what a gift of joy
• Sex Education, as graphic as it is, it’s a show about hope and inclusion and loving and accepting yourself.
• Schitts Creek of course
• CODA

David Rogers:

• The Broken Earth trilogy was great. The Mistborn series. Mostly fiction because the world is depressing enough I don’t need to read more about it in my free time!

BONUS:

You gotta check out Michél’s Spotify playlists:

• SummerHeat+SummerBeats
• The best crew hangs
• Pool of emotions
• H(e)art Beats
• Love in so many words

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And take us in for a landing Slothrust!

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There you go folks, takeover complete. That was so fun. Thank you everyone for your great insights and recommendations and the many books I have added to my reading list. I hope to do another of these someday, maybe issue 200!

And more than anything, thanks for subscribing and reading. I’m lucky enough to have a pretty good day job, but being a journalist or a writer or someone who works in digital media can be a dark endeavor, one that runs at a painful speed fueled by clicks, likes, shares, retweets, where young journalists get paid 50 bucks to write a 200 word blog post about something Machine Gun Kelly tweeted about Slipknot until one day the publication they write for is inevitably bought by a hedge fund and they can’t even go back to selling weed because it’s legal now. Even Substack—the platform where this newsletter started out, which is great software and home to some of my favorite writers—has come to represent this relentless conversion of thought into capital at a massive scale, demanding every one of us to be not just reporter, writer, thinker, but a digital entrepreneur.

I have found that this little newsletter provides a safe harbor from all that. What started as yet another self-promotional tool turned into a refreshing new writing practice. And that turned into what I now think of as my own zine, a little baby publication I send out to you all via wordpress plugins instead of xerox machine. (I know some of you freaks would LOVE it if I printed and mailed this to you.) Everyone knows that a zine is nothing without the community of people who subscribe, read, and pass it along. So thanks again, and as long as you keep checking the mailbox, I’ll keep running off copies.

Tate

Humanity as a for-profit business but instead of getting fired for bad performance you just die

Maria Sibylla Merian, Plate 70 (from “Dissertation in Insect Generations and Metamorphosis in Surinam”, second edition), 1719.

—

This has been a big week for climate change news, not in the usual smoke blotting out the sun way, although smoke did blot out the sun in some places. But mainly I’m referring to a bunch of new international commitments and big speeches that came out of the United Nations General Assembly, and some multibillion-dollar philanthropic pledges too. There was also that weird thing with the late night talk show hosts doing climate change jokes and even This American Life had a climate change episode, at least I think it did, I turned it off when it literally started with Ira Glass saying, “It’s been the kind of summer that makes it seem like the alarmists were right about everything … so yeah, climate change is real.” Come on man are you kidding me.

These kinds of developments should, and I guess they do on some level, feel like progress or maybe like products and byproducts of progress. But lately as we move closer to a place where big action on climate becomes an inevitability, my concern is shifting from fear over inaction to fear of taking the wrong actions. This was illustrated quite vividly when the NYT broke news that Joe Manchin, who once shot a climate bill with a gun and who meets weekly with the oil and gas industry and made half a million dollars last year off of coal production, is in the process of rewriting the Biden administration’s climate legislation to make it friendlier to the fossil fuel industry.

Which gives you this chilling feeling that, yeah of course America will do something, but of course it will be all the wrong things. Or it will sound a lot like the right thing, but with a couple of caveats that ensure maximum wrongness. All of this has made the section from last week’s newsletter on the way corporations co-opt the idea of just transition feel extremely resonant right now. You remember it was the section with the guy in the hot dog suit. Two points in particular, and I know I just sent it last week but it was kind of far down and I know you all are busy people so here is that bit again:

Moussu describes the rhetorical flourishes businesses use in their mission statements and goals that may include just transition, but in the same breath as other goals that are very likely in contradiction to it. Using language like “while,” “at the same time,” and “without sacrificing,” corporate just transition plans describe only win-win situations, which are never likely, and lack specifics on what happens when someone actually has to give something up or pay for something (spoiler, it is not them). In other words, they offer the promise of actions that may not serve their bottom line, on the condition that such actions serve their bottom line.

Another main insight is recognizing that corporations have folded the idea of just transition into a long-running industry CSR strategy, the “business in transition” narrative. In short, industry presents a narrative that 1) things were going along business as usual, 2) something alarming happened that requires urgent action, 3) business is already working on the solution but more needs to be done, and 4) if business’s hands are not tied by regulations, they can lead the way forward. But the trick is, this is a never-ending story. It is always a work in progress, wherein corporate actors must adapt to the latest challenge to continue their tireless work of ensuring a healthy and sustainable world when, in reality, their underlying objectives of profit, growth and power are undermining that world.

In other words, the following narratives are secret weapons to undermining progress toward a more just world:

1. We can do the same basic things we have always done in pursuit of the priorities we have always pursued, [while ensuring/at the same time prioritizing/without sacrificing] racial and economic justice; and
2. We know there is a problem, but we the people who benefit most from the system as it currently stands are working on it and have it under control, so please don’t interfere.

The author here is specifically talking about narratives that corporations use when paying lip service to just transition during climate change. But this week I kept thinking, you know what, that is basically what, everyone says, all the time. By everyone I mean everyone in a position of power within a neoliberal regime. And the message is, we can continue our recurring pattern of extraction, depletion and exploitation in the pursuit of never-ending growth of GWP and wealth accumulation—but just, you know, do it a little better. Tighten a few screws.

That is the direction that, as we get more quote unquote serious about climate change, I am terrified we will end up pursuing. (And I use “we” in kind of weird sense, because I know it’s not the thing I will be pursuing or lots of communities and groups of people will be pursuing, but it’s what we, like the Big We will do.)

I’m beginning to think more and more that the fundamental question that faces all of us as we careen toward this catastrophe is—to what extent do you think the current system is equipped to handle this problem, so long as it is recalibrated to work better. Or, to what extent do you think some central architecture of society needs to be torn down and rebuilt (or rebuilt after it collapses on its own). You might think of this as a throwing the baby out with the bathwater question, but instead of a baby it’s like a tiny little rich old man with a top hat and a monocle who is all pruned up and won’t stop crying and pooping in the bathwater.

I don’t know that it’s necessarily a strict one or the other decision, maybe more like a sliding scale, but from that baby metaphor alone, it is probably clear that I am pretty solidly toward the latter camp these days. Although I guess I think of the tear down/rebuild as more of an adaptive reuse project, hacking off all the good parts and making something new and better out of them. Either way, I am afraid that to keep things mostly as they are puts us on a path to a maybe somewhat lower-carbon but still unsustainable future, and cleaves society further in two—those vulnerable to disaster and those extremely vulnerable to disaster.

One of the reasons that I and I think a lot of people (especially younger people) are feeling this way is this sense of being in a recurring bad dream where we just keep saying we are going to do things better this time around and—whether it’s police reform, housing, economic redevelopment, drilling and mining, agriculture, water use—it always ends the same way. Bad.

I’ve been listening to this podcast miniseries about the state’s COVID-19 recovery called Mass Reboot, produced by the MassINC Polling Group, which I think was really well done and explored the challenges of recovery in different sectors. But there’s this sickening drumbeat that emerges across the episodes in which they point out over and over the ways the pandemic disproportionately impacted a subset of people, lower-income and people of color, and including people working service jobs, renters, gig workers, the growing section of the population that is made vulnerable.

But it’s not just that COVID has had disparate impacts. COVID recovery has had disparate impacts too. The same patterns that made the pandemic so destructive toward some and not others replicated themselves in recovery efforts. So the BIPOC restaurant owners who had to close or barely get by thanks to community support were the least likely to secure PPP loans, while big chains scooped up funds. The arts collectives that have few or zero staff and often are not even incorporated were least likely to secure grant support. The students whose caregivers were most likely to have died in the pandemic are getting the least attention as schools panic about reading and math performance and test scores. Transit agencies react to budget deficits from reduced ridership by cutting service for cost savings, harming low income riders most. Even with moratoria in place, there were still evictions, some 70% people of color, all while the housing market continued to balloon. And on and on and on.

And keep in mind, all of this is happening at a time when we are shoveling billions to help people in need, a historic societal response to a crisis. And yet, it still always favors the wealthy. When you hear facts like that over and over again, delivered in a bloodless tone, “as we all know, there were many disparities…” it becomes impossible for me to think: well this is just a series of unrelated fuckups but we’ll be sure to get it right next time. It becomes impossible to ignore the fact that cruelty is baked deep into this economic system, and things are only getting worse, with a larger and larger number of people in its teeth.

I know this is more of an angry gutbucket kind of post than usual (or I don’t know maybe not), but it’s the way I and I suspect a lot of people can’t help but feel lately. Frustrated, fed up, dare I say radicalized. But I don’t think the take home message here is that things never get any better. It’s that, for things to get better, we have to stop thinking of the sum of humanity as a for-profit business, only instead of getting fired for bad performance you just fucking die.

That also means no longer assuming that such a thing is merely human nature. One of the characteristics of capitalism is not just that it is inherently unequal, it is that its participants must accept that violent treatment of huge swaths of society is natural, it’s just the way we are, sorry we don’t make the rules. Of course we make the rules.

—

Links

• Boston City Council mandated big emission reductions for large buildings, one of only a few such ordinances in the country. It’s a major win, especially for climate justice advocates, because no offsets will be allowed and a board of community groups will oversee the process.
• Big news from UNGA, with China pledging to stop building coal plants abroad, and Biden pledging to double foreign climate aid, although tbh I have no idea how he expects to make that happen.
• Meanwhile, Biden’s domestic climate agenda is imploding and Joe Manchin who is more or less on oil and gas industry payroll wants to rewrite it.
• Biden is doing a horrible job on immigration and Border Patrol is a rotten institution.
• Remember that article about how there’s never been any federal rules on heat exposure in the workplace? Well OSHA says it’s finally going to do it.
• Bill Gates continues to use his money and influence to steer Africa toward GM seeds, industrialized agriculture, pesticide use, petroleum based machinery instead of agroecology.
• More than half of young people think humanity is doomed.
• Baby poop has ten times as much microplastic in it as adult poop.
• A billionaire wants to build the city of the future in the Southwest, called “Telosa.” What could possibly go wrong.
• Cars are horrible they killed 42,060 people last year. There are however some straightforward solutions.
• Hundreds of refugees, mostly from Africa, live in an abandoned factory in the Paris suburbs, and painted a 40-foot mural on the building to bring positive visibility to the residents.
• More ghost forests on the East Coast, trees turned pale white by encroaching saltwater from sea level rise.
• Cities and counties in Colorado are suing the oil industry for the costs of climate mitigation and adaptation. In this palace we stan lawsuits against the oil industry.
• Cool story of a queer collective in Seattle turning a big 12-bedroom property into affordable housing and community space.
• I don’t know why Jon Stewart has to be such an asshole.
• I once read a profile of the founders of Genius that described them as “real-life John Ralphios.” Media buffoon Chris Cillizza called them “the future of journalism.” Sasha Frere-Jones quit the New Yorker to go work for them. And now, as we all could have predicted, the rap lyric annotation company turned media disruptor is headed for the shitcan.

—

Podcasts

I was a big fan of the Slowdown with Tracy K Smith, who stepped down from hosting after a great run. But now the Slowdown is back! And it’s hosted by one of my favorite poets Ada Limón.

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Listening

This new Low record Hey What is amazing. Like last week’s pick Injury Reserve, it is the soundtrack to the apocalypse.

—

Boy oh boy angry post lookout someone needs a nap. On the upside of things, we are entering scented candle season again so I can look forward to our home being enveloped in the bourgeois comforts of scents like cardamom, toasted pumpkin, and leather jacket. Do yourself a favor and buy yourself a nice scented candle this weekend, maybe apple cider or Montana forest or fern and moss. You deserve it.

Tate

‘Transition is inevitable. Justice is not.’

—

In the past five years, the term “just transition” has become, maybe not a household term, but certainly pervasive throughout climate discourse. You see it in environmental justice groups’ missions, academic papers, government policy, NGO campaigns, philanthropic strategies, corporate PR, even chamber of commerce talking points.

Rooted in the labor movement, in its current, simplest form, just transition means moving to a low-carbon economy in such a way that workers and communities that were once reliant on the fossil fuel economy for their livelihoods are not left behind. The classic example is, when a coal plant shuts down, making sure the workers have things like severance or early retirement funds, job training, comparable-wage jobs in other industries, etc. Because the change is going to happen, but the question is, at whose cost—or as Climate Justice Alliance puts it, “Transition is inevitable. Justice is not.”

The term catapulted into the mainstream when, through no small struggle, labor and justice advocates managed to get one little baby clause into the preamble of the 2015 Paris Agreement, calling for a “just transition of the workforce and the creation of decent work and quality jobs in accordance with nationally defined development priorities…” Three years later, it was a central topic in COP24 in Katowice, Poland.

As with the spread of terminology like climate justice, sustainability before that, and even the word “green” before that, it’s an indicator of the concept’s power and a testament to the work of the people who elevated it. A victory, in other words. But just transition’s widespread adoption also threatens to undermine that power, splintering it into new meanings, watering it down, hijacking and steering it away from its original purpose. At the same time, how just transition plays out in the real world can vary enormously based on the communities, governments and economies putting it into action.

That’s the premise of Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World, a 2019 collection of essays by scholars and activists edited by Dimitris Stevis, Edouard Morena, and Dunja Krause. (I’m a longtime fan of Morena’s work, particularly his book The Price of Climate Action, and last year we co-authored an article for the French publication AOC on Bloomberg’s presidential candidacy. You can read about it here.) Through a look at the history of just transition and several case studies from around the world, the book seeks to answer the question: What is at the heart of the concept, and how can it be put into action in ways that honor its true intention?

The editors set out to challenge the frequent lip service paid to the concept, starting with discussion of COP24, which was known as the “Just Transition COP,” but seemed to mostly miss the point (it was also sponsored by coal companies). The Katowice COP, “rather than providing a clear sense of how a just transition can be achieved, exposed the gap between climate policy makers’ narrow understandings of just transition, and the complex and multifaceted reality of a ‘living concept’ whose origins and meanings lie deep in the everyday experiences of workers and frontline communities.”

Aside from blatant hypocrisies surrounding the use of the term, it’s also been diluted, tossed into every platform and strategy document with little commitment to its meaning. The editors quote NAACP’s Jacqueline Patterson saying, “It’s a concern when Big Greens and others are using the term and getting funded for using the term. It’s become the term du jour for foundations, and those front-line communities become objectified.”

The evolution of the term hasn’t been all bad, however. For example, grassroots climate justice groups in the United States have broadened the ambitions of just transition, calling not just for a move to new and dignified jobs, but to “build economic and political power to shift from an extractive economy to a regenerative economy,” as the Climate Justice Alliance describes it.

In fact, though it may have drifted from its distinct labor union origins, we have the just transition concept largely to thank for the way the modern climate movement is laced with labor and social justice goals, from the Green New Deal to global climate strikes. And though there may be a battle underway for just transition’s meaning, the authors suggest that the idea has plenty of juice left, if its practitioners remain rooted in its history and the needs of workers and communities.

Origin in unions

Just Transitions emphasizes that to understand the concept, you must understand its origin in trade unions. The editors describe how just transition long predates the climate movement, starting in the 1970s and 1980s to allow workers a path out of jobs with dangerous environmental and health hazards, or to provide support when such industries were shut down or shipped overseas.

Just transition eventually became the animating force that would allow labor and environmental movements to unite around common goals. Anabella Rosemberg, of Greenpeace International and formerly of the International Trade Union Confederation, chronicles how the labor movement went from ambivalence and sometimes animosity toward the environmental movement (and vice versa) to becoming a central actor in climate negotiations.

Still today, American unions sometimes fight environmental regulations and the transition to renewables, mainly because new energy jobs in the US are often not union jobs, but the 1990s were a time of much greater tension between the movements (in large part because of the influence of the AFL-CIO). The two camps were divided by the industry narrative that jobs and environmental regulation were inherently at odds. But in the 2000s, the labor movement, especially international unions, went from a mainly defensive stance, to a proactive one on climate and the environment. Labor fought for a role within cliquey and elitist global climate negotiations, met with suspicion and even disbelief that they would be sincerely dedicated to the issue. But eventually the UNFCCC granted unions official “constituency” status, alongside business, research, and nonprofit organizations.

It was their added power, in part, that managed to get just transition into the Paris Agreement and by extension into mainstream discourse. But, as Rosemberg concludes, the inclusion of just transition language became seen as too much of an end in itself. The real power of the concept is as a means to build organizing power between workers and climate advocates “and in the process, re-place the values of international solidarity and social justice at the heart of both the union and climate agendas.”

The never-ending story

One of my favorite chapters in the book is an essay by Nils Moussu of the University of Lausanne, who critiques the way corporations co-opt just transition to retain power and perpetuate business as usual. As Moussu points out, businesses have done a remarkable job of positioning themselves as climate heroes, despite being the largest emitters of carbon dioxide and often powerful forces blocking government action on climate. The goal in framing themselves as climate leaders is to retain their hegemony and increase their power to define climate change solutions as mainly technological and market-based, such that they can protect profits and prevent new regulations.

This is done in large part through powerful messaging campaigns that have allowed corporate actors to “present themselves as the main architects of a ‘safe and prosperous future,'” thereby avoiding criticism, setting limits on what is permissible within climate action, and shutting out more radical or transformative alternatives that would undermine their power:

As the main character of the narrative, unsurprisingly, business describes itself as a ‘frustrated hero’ willing to do more, provided that the ‘right regulations’ are put in place (e.g. regulations that favour price signals through carbon pricing over command-and-control policies). Through this self-description, business is able to escape the role of the villain and to promote the view that climate talks should not be about business, but conducted in dialogue with business, and that these talks should produce regulation for business instead of regulation of business.

The best way I can think of to illustrate this is through a sketch in Tim Robinson’s I Think You Should Leave, which is honestly my primary way of engaging with the world lately. In the sketch, someone driving a hot dog-shaped car crashes into a business storefront, and as the people inside are trying to figure out what happened, one guy in particular is super eager to find the culprit.

Moussu describes the rhetorical flourishes businesses use in their mission statements and goals that may include just transition, but in the same breath as other goals that are very likely in contradiction to it. Using language like “while,” “at the same time,” and “without sacrificing,” corporate just transition plans describe only win-win situations, which are never likely, and lack specifics on what happens when someone actually has to give something up or pay for something (spoiler, it is not them). In other words, they offer the promise of actions that may not serve their bottom line, on the condition that such actions serve their bottom line.

Another main insight is recognizing that corporations have folded the idea of just transition into a long-running industry CSR strategy, the “business in transition” narrative. In short, industry presents a narrative that 1) things were going along business as usual, 2) something alarming happened that requires urgent action, 3) business is already working on the solution but more needs to be done, and 4) if business’s hands are not tied by regulations, they can lead the way forward. But the trick is, this is a never-ending story. It is always a work in progress, wherein corporate actors must adapt to the latest challenge to continue their tireless work of ensuring a healthy and sustainable world when, in reality, their underlying objectives of profit, growth and power are undermining that world.

Reading this chapter, the inescapable “climate pledge” comes to mind. Every industry, every business, every government has issued some ambitious, say, 30-year climate pledge. Lots of long-term ambition, far too little short-term action to get there. But you have our pledge. We are working on it. Check back in 2050 and we’ll give you an update.

A revolutionary political project

The remaining bulk of the book is case studies, from the American South, South Africa, Germany, Argentina, Australia, and Canada, presenting a drumbeat of reminders that local culture, systems and economies shape how climate action unfolds. There’s no one solution. Places with tremendous advantages often disappoint, while seemingly hopeless political environments yield inspiring success.

The best example of the latter comes from Jackson, Mississippi, written by Kali Akuno, executive director of Cooperation Jackson, a Black-led network of worker-owned cooperatives and supporting institutions that is blossoming within a highly conservative political regime that is holding back communities of color. “As Peter Moskowitz wrote, ‘The idea is essentially this: since Jackson’s current economy isn’t working for its residents, and its current political system isn’t doing much to help, why not create a new economic and political system right alongside the old one?’”

Cooperation Jackson is similar to networks like PUSH Buffalo in New York or Boston Ujima Project, which carve out small, alternative economies within the husk of the old economy, but do so with the intention of building power and changing society outside of its own immediate scope. So Cooperation Jackson consists of an urban farming collective, a cafe and catering service, and a landscaping and composting service, operating from a community center and 20 parcels of land it owns. The network is also building an “eco-village” pilot project, a live-work community on a protected land trust, with solar-thermal energy and permaculture landscaping.

But Cooperation Jackson also educates its members on organizing and political principles, advocates for changes to municipal regulations, and through participation in networks like the It Takes Roots Alliance, advocates for national policy change. All of this is undergirded by a commitment to nothing short of societal transformation.

“It is about simultaneously and inextricably transitioning the self, the community, the city and the world. In this sense, it differs from more common understandings of just transition that centre on the energy sector and workers, and that do not carry a broader, emancipatory and revolutionary political project.”

—

Other examples are downright depressing, like Australia’s corporate capture and redefining of just transition. The example in Canada is a rare, top-down government effort that does a pretty good job of supporting workers, but it’s all in service of transitioning the country’s coal plants to natural gas plants, which undermines the necessary emissions reductions. Also Canada doesn’t even burn very much coal so whomp whomp. It reminds me, not of the US government’s efforts of course don’t be silly, but our liberal philanthropic (Bloomberg) and market-led coal shutdown that enabled a ton of new gas infrastructure whomp whomp.

So on one level, I guess I came away from this book, which overall I highly recommend, somewhat depressed by the state of just transition. It serves a little like a pair of those sunglasses in Rowdy Roddy Piper masterpiece They Live, but you put them on and instead of seeing the words “just transition” you might see the words “quarterly earnings” or “corporate partnerships.”

But that’s definitely not always the case, as the Jackson example shows, and above all else the editors and authors plumb the complexity and challenges of true just transition. Also the reality that it’s not an end state; it’s a pursuit. Much like electing a new president who does not have a gold toilet or a wave of racial justice protests, just transition is a portal to something better. And it can be an extremely powerful one, as it not only offers a distant view of a shiny new post-carbon future, but also leads us to many real-world paths to getting there.

—

Listening

I can’t stop listening to this brand new record By the Time I Get to Phoenix, from Tempe, Arizona rap group Injury Reserve, which sounds like listening to the apocalypse but in a good way. There’s actually a really sad story behind it because Jordan Groggs one of the MCs died at 32 last year, so this is the last thing he recorded. But it is very good and has haunting lines like “The smoke never clear / strap up your own boots it’s all uphill from here” and “You better run and hide / take your ass inside/ If you don’t go breathe the air you might stay alive” and “But let’s be honest here / This don’t end with agree to disagree, it ain’t possible.”

—

Going to keep it simple today folks. I would like to dedicate this issue to the older gentleman who lived next door to us, who I would regularly pass while walking the dogs and he would be sitting on a stool in his open garage next to his Lincoln sedan smoking a cigar and I would wave to him and say how’s it going and he’d wave and say howaahhya every time. Or sometimes I’d see him from a distance and he’d just put a hand up to wave and I’d put a hand up to wave. Today a fire truck and an ambulance pulled up to the curb and it turned out that his family came to visit and he had passed away in his home.

I never got his name, and it always seemed like that wave and hello was really the extent of the socialization he was looking for, but I do regret that I never talked to him at any length. I left him a note during the pandemic to call if he needed anything but never heard from him. Anyway, he was getting up there, and it happens when you live in an old neighborhood, but I’ll be sad to not see him in his garage smoking his cigars, always eager to wave hello. It was a nice moment, I hope, in both of our days, and I will miss it.

Tate

Pragmatism takes no chances and always protects the status of the pragmatist

Tortoises, terrapins, and turtles. H. Sotheran, J. Baer & co.,1872

—

There is this line in the 2017 article in New York Magazine that would become David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, in which he’s listing off the many reasons humanity has been in denial about climate change for so many years, including “the fact that the country is dominated by a group of technocrats who believe any problem can be solved and an opposing culture that doesn’t even see warming as a problem worth addressing.”

That latter category has been a big concern for obvious reasons. But the former speaks to a troubling, nip and tuck optimism of climate moderates or what some are calling soft denialists, who express concern for climate change, but generally believe this is something that can be fixed with some tech and market-based solutions that will ultimately not rock the boat too much—i.e., we might drive electric cars or something, but we’re not going to stop exporting oil are you crazy.

It’s a perspective that sort of rhymes with a lot of other takes that come up on all sorts of issues, from trans rights to policing reform. I’ve always had a hard time completely wrapping my head around what this thing is, exactly. Maybe it’s just centrism or incrementalism or what Annie Lowery calls “facts man,” but I feel like it’s a broader phenomenon than that. One way I’ve been thinking about it is a certain kind of pragmatism, an affinity for all things that seem reasonable and an aversion to things that seem outside the realm of likelihood, or maybe comfort.

I guess the actual definition if I take a second to google it is “dealing with things sensibly and realistically in a way that is based on practical rather than theoretical considerations.” And there is a whole school of philosophy called pragmatism but I’m not really getting that technical here let’s just stick with the google definition today. It’s basically a person who considers a problem, looks around, and chooses the response that just seems reasonable.

Well, that certainly seems reasonable, and I guess I don’t think of this as some horrible trait in a person (though there are horrible examples of it to come), and the pragmatist is very often well-intentioned and a potential ally even. In some sense, by necessity, we all start from a place of pragmatism when encountering a new problem, before we’ve pushed ourselves beyond the knee-jerk response to take in a larger or longer view. So this is kind of a tricky thing to write about because I don’t really want to be like, ah god here’s why I hate all these guys (did I mention pragmatists are pretty much always white guys?).

But I do think they are often wrong. And I am trying to wrap my head around why this kind of pragmatism bothers me so much, and why it’s a problem, and why it’s so, so prevalent in the face of problems that demand more than mere common sense. So I decided to write down some things that I think define this type of pragmatism and why I consider it to be such a misguided outlook.

Pragmatism is a version of lacking empathy

One problem with pragmatism, is within the definition, words like “practical,” “realistic,” and “sensible” are doing an enormous amount of heavy lifting. And frequently, the judgment about whether something qualifies is based on the limited data within immediate reach of the pragmatist making the judgment. The very idea of common sense implies a kind of wisdom that lies in the near vicinity.

That doesn’t necessarily mean that pragmatism is always based in folk wisdom that everyone has access to, as frequently the pragmatist has some strain of specialized knowledge, but it’s knowledge from a fixed perspective. Too often, pragmatism is used as a tool to avoid understanding the perspectives of other people with different life experiences, for whom what is practical and reasonable may be radically different.

An example I use a lot is that for a whole set of people, ceasing air travel would not seem like a realistic course of action, unless you consider that only like 10% of the world ever flies in in airplane. Carbon offset programs may seem like a very pragmatic climate solution, unless you’re living in a neighborhood where such a program is allowing a nearby factory to pollute your air and make your family sick. What is practical to that person will be very different, and a problem like climate change requires us to, not become a climate change expert, exactly, but to listen and learn.

I sometimes think of this profile of Joe Rogan, maybe the worst example of a pragmatist, spawning an army of supplement-loving pragmatists who are sick and tired of being told they need to think about things differently. For Slate, Justin Peters writes of Rogan’s following, “The common thread is the privileging of ‘common sense’ over all other inputs in the struggle to forge a life philosophy, and the idealization of one’s own life experience over that of other people.”

This is why pragmatism so often directs outrage at irrational upstarts with their new pronouns, new racial terminology, calls for diversity, and yes, their cancel culture—a response Osita Nwanevu calls reactionary liberalism. It represents a human impulse we are all prone to, but hopefully push past: This is something different than the reality I have come to rely upon, and it feels wrong, not reasonable. Peters continues, “Because Rogan and his guests do not take identitarian critiques seriously, they just naturally assume that no one should take them seriously.”

Pragmatism favors what is convenient over what is necessary

This is probably the biggest problem when it comes to climate change pragmatism, the way that it demands that we make decisions from a position of what seems achievable, instead of beginning with what is necessary and moving backward to figure out how we get there. In some cases, the former is a strategic approach; in fact, strategic might be another term that could be used for what I’m calling pragmatic. Strategic meaning only taking action if there is a known path for how it will move you toward where you want to go. There’s something admirable about doing what you can with what you have.

The problem is that it frequently sandbags your efforts, doling out action in tiny doses that will not bother most people, and may feel like steps in the right direction, but ultimately will never get you to a destination that, in the case of a problem like climate change, is non-negotiable. This happens all the time in philanthropy and nonprofits, as some huge, difficult campaign or piece of legislation comes up, but stoic leadership steps in to say, why take this on when there’s a good chance we will have nothing to show for it, and instead can just do this smaller campaign that is a more popular, less offensive to those in power, and ends in demonstrable progress. But in some cases, demonstrable progress is, in execution, indistinguishable from failure.

Pragmatism takes no chances, in service of protecting the status of the pragmatist. Again, let’s look at another terrible example of pragmatism, which is Joe Manchin who I will never reference without also pointing out that he literally shot a piece of climate legislation with a gun. Manchin, also infamously, recently said to a utility trade group when discussing the Biden administration’s pledge to cut carbon emissions in half by 2030, “I know there’s a change coming, OK? But I’ve always been very, very cautious about this. … I’m concerned that they’re setting a very aggressive timetable.”

Now, this is giving Manchin way too much credit for being a good faith actor, which he’s certainly not as a senator who has weekly meetings with oil and gas lobbyists, but he’s essentially saying the timeline that scientific consensus says is needed to avoid catastrophe is too fast for comfort. It’s just not reasonable. Emily Atkin in Heated called this a “new iteration of climate denial” that’s being embraced beyond the GOP, insisting on a slower timetable for action. “Spoiler alert: we all want a less aggressive timeline,” she tweeted. “Climate change doesn’t give a shit about what we want.”

Pragmatism relies on a linear theory of change

The theory of change behind pragmatism, and one that may seem beyond critique, is that A+B=C. There is an isolated, distinct problem, there is a set of solutions, and if you pick the right one you will solve it. If you pick the wrong one, or you try to take into account too many other tangential, unrelated problems, you are only working against your own cause. But this is an oversimplified view of social change.

Maybe the king of this brand of pragmatism is Matt Yglesias, who has made the most lucrative career out of being wrong about everything since Chris Cillizza. Yglesias vilifies climate activists who view climate change as a justice issue that overlaps and shares the same root causes with many other social problems. He particularly hates the Sunrise Movement, mainly because they consider broader issues of inequality and racial and economic justice to be inseparable from climate change (a stance that not only appreciates the systemic nature of climate change, but also allows people to engage with an otherwise abstract problem).

Amy Westervelt and Georgia Wright wrote a great opinion piece on Yglesias’s bad climate takes for Hot Take (Emily Atkin also took on the topic). Here’s a key part:

His persistent cries for Sunrise to “be reasonable!” and impassioned pleas for pragmatism are part of an overall argument to keep the climate movement focused only on technology and energy sources, not the root causes of the problem, which all really boil down to injustice and inequality. This fundamental ignorance of intersectionality is nothing new – it’s the same tired critique used by white moderates throughout the decades to maintain power and silence the powerless, and yet he parrots it like it’s revolutionary. (If climate change was really as simplistic and siloed as Matty would have us think, wouldn’t it be solved by now?)

Pragmatism is only ever right for a brief window and then it is always wrong

OK maybe not always wrong, but usually. And the reason is that pragmatism is time delimited, meaning pragmatic judgments involve an assessment of facts based on what makes sense, right now. And crucially, it underestimates how much that reality might change not that long from now. Thus, pragmatists are destined to be wrong, because the passage of time means the preposterous becomes commonplace and the commonplace becomes preposterous. This is really easy to see in topics like our understanding of gender fluidity, which has changed what we consider to be common sense.

One example I can think of locally is our mayoral frontrunner in Boston, Michelle Wu, who as a city councillor in 2019, when the MBTA was considering public transit fare hikes, ran an editorial in the Boston Globe rejecting the fare hikes, but also calling for public transit to instead be free. This was a ridiculous, pie-in-the-sky notion to many pragmatic commentators and political opponents, a stunt that Wu couldn’t possibly be serious about. Just two years later, nearly every mayoral candidate in a packed field is running on some form of transit fare elimination, and the state just started a three-month pilot to make a high-ridership bus route free to all.

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All of these complaints basically boil down to one critical flaw—pragmatism bases what is possible on what is right here, right now. Call it a lack of imagination, which pragmatism does not put much stock into. But if everyone is making judgments by looking at the current reality, then success is measured against only what has already been done. And things more or less stay the same.

That gets to another, more sinister side of pragmatism. On one hand, it may have admirable goals, but merely fails at achieving them. On the other, pragmatism often provides cover for those intentionally holding back change, because the way things are now actually serves many pragmatists quite well.

There’s a reason the ideas pragmatists puts forward are remarkably similar to the ideas reactionaries put forward. One day, cancel culture is the concern of the pragmatic liberal, the next it’s the battle cry at CPAC. Carbon capture is the realistic solution of the climate moderate, then it’s the solution of choice for ExxonMobil. Whether they share the same intentions or not, they yield the same outcomes, or lack of outcomes. Pragmatism really wishes it could make the world a better place, we all do obviously we are all on the same team here, but pragmatism just can’t do it. Pragmatism has to be reasonable. Pragmatism always has a lot to lose.

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Links

• When I first got back into journalism about 10 years ago, one of the first stories I covered regularly was the Divest Harvard campaign, which was run by highly impressive 20 year olds who would go on to become leaders in the movement (and one state senator!). Just last night, Harvard announced it would fully divest its $41 billion endowment. It’s a big victory.
• Doreen St. Félix on Michael K. Williams.
• California’s carbon offset program is full of loopholes, including allowing polluters to take credit for forests that have already burned down and forests that have been protected for years. “We have documented over $400 million worth of credits issued that we think don’t help the climate.”
• About half of Americans planning to move say natural disasters were a factor in their decision.
• A Boston startup wants to launch a bunch of small satellites to improve radar storm detection which sounds useful and also like a Bond villain’s cover story.
• Texas’s voting restriction laws and abortion laws are working in tandem to secure GOP minority rule.
• Jia Tolentino on SB8.
• Adam Serwer on the Supreme Court’s use of the shadow docket. “…an ideal arrangement for a party that has not won a majority of the votes in a presidential election since Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man, and that sees the popular majorities that vote against it as composed of illegitimate semi-citizens who have no right to govern.”
• This reality show where activists compete on TV to secure funding for their work is disgusting and everyone hates it and it should never see the light of day and also it’s kind of how most philanthropy works.
• Harvard now owns ONE THIRD of the Boston neighborhood of Allston, and residents don’t entirely know what they’re going to do with it. But it will probably become “a playground for folks who are mostly white people who have a lot of money” and/or “a neighborhood populated entirely by pharma bros.”
• Stories from New York restaurant workers on 9/11. “Someone suggested the owners might not approve. ‘I was like, ‘Fuck off! I don’t care.””

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Watching

The Night Manager. I’m on a mini-series kick lately and boy did I sleep on this one.

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Listening

Eso Que Tu Haces, Lido Pimienta

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Thursday was ~*my wife*~ Jamie’s birthday and for the second year in a pandemic-era tradition I made a charcuterie board so elaborate that it strains the bounds of pragmatism. One day I will do a complete wild card and write a newsletter on how to make your dream charcuterie board and it will be the most popular thing I’ve ever written. A teaser, the secret is the Three Vs: variety, visual impact, and a very large bill at Whole Foods.

I think this year’s may have surpassed last year’s in terms of presentation, and there were some new finds in the mix like this chocolate vinegar which was very good. I’m comforted to know that I have two backup careers, which are charcuterie board making and dog photography. You can hire me to do both but my rates are exorbitant. For a VIP like you, I will give a discount.

Tate

PS last night I had a dream I was moving into an apartment with Phil Collins

The air conditioning dilemma hammers home the almost-comical limits of individual action to solve this global problem

Oceanic birds of South America. v.1. c1936.

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One thing that is getting difficult that I didn’t anticipate but probably should have when writing a newsletter about how people live during global crisis is the fact that there would be a large number of crises to write about and it would become more difficult to know what to focus on when. That’s especially true because I never wanted to mail out just a list of horrible things happening that eventually becomes this droning white noise of disaster. But that does mean I periodically feel like I have to start the newsletter by saying, well here’s a bunch of horrible stuff happening like right this very second, and then afterwards we can talk about air conditioning for a while. But I guess that is kind of what living amid crisis is like.

So this week, there is the overall peril that the people of Afghanistan are facing punctuated by the recent bombing that resulted from a totally botched U.S. withdrawal from the country and an insufficient to non-existent plan for supporting refugees. And the lesson we seem to be taking away from it is “we will seek retribution” which is what started this whole endless war that killed 47,245 Afghan civilians in the first place, but you know what we will put a boot up your ass it’s the American way as Toby Keith once said and that continues to be a fucking awesome way that works every single time.

Also there is a hurricane barreling toward Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that is rapidly intensifying so the ninth named storm of the season could be a bad one.

And finally, SB 8 is taking effect soon in Texas, which effectively bans abortion in the state, but in a sadistic twist, allows anyone living in Texas to sue anyone else that they believe is assisting a person in obtaining an abortion, including just giving them a ride somewhere (you can donate to NNAF’s fundraiser to support Texas abortion funds here). That bill is actually one of 666 new laws (I am not making that number up) going into effect in Texas on September first, including one that makes so anyone can carry a gun around without a license, one that makes it a felony to block a roadway during a protest, and one that requires the Star Spangled Banner to play before all sports games. To me, nothing signals a state that truly appreciates liberty like the passage of over 600 new laws restricting the lives of its citizenry, fuck yeah Texas is truly putting the boots in everyone’s asses keep it up.

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But speaking of the droning white noise of disaster, I really do want to talk about air conditioning, which has been on my mind a lot lately after a trip to Phoenix, but also as I sit next to my own window unit cranking its way through Boston’s fourth heat wave of the summer. Not so much about how air conditioning works or how we can decarbonize it or make it more efficient, but more like what it means to use air conditioning, and how we should feel about it, and also fair warning, I don’t really have a very clear point on this one, just some things that have been bothering me.

Recently we got in the car to go pick up some ice cream and started talking about things we are going to miss as climate change keeps getting worse, and I said I wasn’t sure but one thing that I really worry about the most is power outages, including during extreme heat waves. During the depths of the COVID pandemic I would sometimes think, god what if we didn’t have electricity in the house right now? And the answer is we would have been completely fucked.

A big part of that danger, even more so in places outside of Massachusetts, is the loss of air conditioning, which makes day-to-day life possible in huge parts of the world, at least life as we’ve come to expect it. Air conditioning is a complicated presence in our lives, because on one hand it can be a luxury, even a frivolity, the cliche of the Californian driving around with the convertible top down and AC blasting comes to mind. From time to time I shudder to think about Chase Field in Phoenix where the Diamondbacks play, which has a retractable dome and a massive HVAC unit that runs even when the dome is open, cooling the 50,000 seat park to 78 degrees in the summer, or the equivalent of cooling 2,500 homes (the stadium has pool and a hot tub too). Some of the richest parts of the Middle East have begun air conditioning the outdoors, including Qatar—one of the fastest-warming places in the world AND the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas—where an open air soccer stadium pipes in cool air through vents at ankle-level and similar systems cool outdoor malls and markets.

In many places around the world, however, air-conditioning is something of a necessity (keeping in mind there’s a sliding scale for what one needs) or at least is in very high demand, and that list of places is growing. According to the Department of Energy, three-quarters of all homes in the United States have air-conditioning, which uses 12% of the country’s residential electricity use. Air conditioning has become more efficient since it became widespread in the 1950s, and various studies have shown that it pays for itself by increasing productivity (lol) and even preventing fights. But its use is also feeding its own booming demand as climate change worsens. In the U.S., where we already use a ton of AC, that demand is projected to increase by 59% by 2050. One estimate projects global energy demand from air conditioning to triple by 2050. As you can imagine, who gets to use air conditioning is vastly unequal, and the growing demand will only increase the financial burden on lower-income households, or leave them to swelter.

Air conditioning is also a vivid example of the way that cheap and abundant fossil fuel energy has allowed our quality of life and urban development to surge based on the falsehood that we could continue to burn that fuel indefinitely without consequence. It has supplemented growth of cities in the Southwest and South in the U.S. and megacities in the Tropics.

In addition to growing demand, climate change threatens to make it so that more places are becoming literally unlivable without air conditioning. We’re learning more about the increased frequency of extreme heat and humidity combining to the point that the body shuts down, with so-called wet bulb temperatures above 86 degrees Fahrenheit becoming deadly and then pushing past the body’s capacity to survive when it hits 96 degrees.

So on one hand, air conditioning is this luxury that is used without restraint by the wealthiest cities and countries, increasingly so, and that has allowed unsustainable expansion. It’s also a resource that will allow us to adapt to climate change, but will likely cleave society into those who can afford it and those who can’t. And finally, you have air conditioning as a necessity. An emergency tool for survival. One of the reasons I’ve been thinking about air conditioning is that I’m reading Ministry for the Future, in which there is a haunting scene depicted in the near future that I will only partially spoil, involving an act of violence over an air conditioner running on a generator during an extreme heatwave.

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For all of these reasons, air conditioning makes for a potent example of the strained relationship between our individual lifestyles and the global reality of climate change. Specifically, it’s a reminder of the way our actions both feed climate change, but also how our individual behavior cannot stop it. But even worse than that, it demonstrates how climate change makes it impossible to even make responsible or “climate friendly” individual choices.

I would guess maybe 7 years ago, after we had moved into a new apartment that had no air conditioning, we heard about a friend of a friend who was getting rid of a window unit, so we jumped at it. I worked from home long before everyone worked from home, and there was always at least one annual heat wave in Boston when it became impossible to do anything in the house without some kind of cooler. I can’t remember exactly why the guy was giving it away, but he was like a middle-aged dude in a bougie neighborhood of Boston, and he was definitely doing so as a lifestyle choice. Like he was quitting AC. I’ve known plenty of people who intentionally avoided getting air conditioning in places where it doesn’t get super hot, sometimes to save money, but other times feeling guilty about it or like it was in indulgence, an impulse I completely share.

It’s true that many of us don’t really need air conditioning. There is growing research that your body will adjust to heat if you allow it to. And I’ve definitely lived in places where I didn’t have air conditioning and it was fine except for like a few days out of the year and then you just sort of sweated it out and it wasn’t bad. There are many places like this, in California, parts of the East Coast, that are kind of on the brink of needing it. In Portland in the 2000s, I used to inflate an air mattress and sleep on our balcony during the annual heat wave, although I don’t think that will cut it anymore.

Around the same time we got that window unit, like the mid to late 20teens, there was this glut of think pieces about how air conditioning was awful and we had to quit it, like smoking or eating red meat. Consider the Guardian’s “Ditch your air conditioning. You’ll be fine,” which declared, “A hot room won’t usually kill you, but a hot planet will. If you feel sweaty, just imagine how your grandchildren are going to feel.” Or the baldly self-congratulatory, “I don’t need air conditioning, and neither do you,” in the Post, which deems Americans (or presumably Americans who are not the author) “greedy and silly” for their reliance on it.

What seems silly to me now, however, after the past couple of years that have shattered heat records all over the world and killed hundreds of people in the recent Pacific Northwest heat wave alone, is the idea of giving up AC back in 2015 as a way to fight climate change. This is sample size myself, but I know several people who completely understandably have started using air conditioning for the first time this summer. We’ve used our window unit by far more than we ever have, with three heat emergencies and four heat advisories in Boston in 2021. So what did all of that AC abandonment get us, other than the temporary balm of feeling like we were sacrificing something for a good reason?

This part is a tough for me because Americans totally do use too much AC, and too much electricity, we are hogs and it’s ridiculous. The impulse to use less is a good and noble one, the right thing to do even. And readers will know that I am actually a believer that individual change is a necessary part of confronting climate change. Solar panels, ditching the SUV, going electric, all for it, for a variety of reasons. I’m also a big believer that local change can add up and cascade into global change.

But the air conditioning dilemma hammers home the almost-comical limits of individual action to solve this global problem. Consider the cruel absurdity of a well-intentioned middle-class person in the Global North having a revelation in 2015 that they had to get rid of air conditioning because of climate change, and then industry and government perpetuates fossil fuel use for another five years, and now air conditioning use is going to spike all over the world because temperatures are becoming increasingly miserable if not dangerous.

In other words, even as more people became aware of climate change and realized they could live without air conditioning, the lack of systemic change has meant that a lot of those people probably have to start using AC once again, along with many more people who never have. It’s not just that individual choices alone don’t work, when not translated to transformative change, it actually makes it so that responsible consumer choices become impossible.

This gets back to what I was saying about deciding where to live during climate change. We can try to do the right thing, make the right decisions that make us part of the solution and not part of the problem—and you know what we fucking should—but the brutal fact is, our individual lives may very well be simply engulfed by the failure of institutions and the cruelty of industry.

And that’s what I’ve got for today, goodbye!

Just kidding, but kind of not kidding. I don’t really have a take-home point on this one. It’s very confusing and upsetting and one of the most difficult parts about being a person who likes to feel in control in a world where we are all losing control. But maybe one point here is the reminder that so many of us are still thinking we can deal with this problem in the margins. And even those of us who know that’s not going to cut it can still only really do things that are in the margins. But the changes ahead are not marginal.

Nobody should feel bad about giving up air conditioning and then feeling like it’s pointless, and nobody should feel bad about wanting to live in comfort, but it’s hard to avoid either. One of the toughest lessons about living with climate change is that, though it may not be your fault, and the solution may not be within your personal grasp, how you are currently living is most certainly causing it, and how you are currently living is going to radically change because of it.

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Watching

Speaking of helplessness in the face of failing systems, I just finished the third and final season of The Deuce from David Simon and crime writer George Pelecanos, and I liked it maybe just as much as The Wire. If you haven’t seen it, whatever you think the show is, I can almost guarantee it is much more. It might not be for everyone, mainly because it’s largely about sex work and is a bit on the naked side at times, but like The Wire, it’s about the failure of institutions, even when they are made up of well-intentioned people. And on the much more fun side, it’s about the completely bonkers world of New York nightlife in the 1970s and early 80s, from the tiny punk bars to giant disco clubs.

It’s also very Crisis Palacey, in that just as it is about how futile it is to try to change systems, it’s also about always fighting and how change does in fact happen, just in ways we don’t expect, and how people always take care of each other and find joy even in the worst conditions.

Me when you ask me the point of this week’s newsletter

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Reading and Listening

I read this cool little book that I picked up in Tucson called Rez Metal: Inside the Navajo Nation Heavy Metal Scene, which is actually a companion to a documentary by the same name that I haven’t been able to track down to watch yet. So it’s not exactly a book, more like an oral history told through transcribed interviews they conducted for the documentary. But it focuses on this one band I Don’t Konform, which recorded an album with this guy who produced a bunch of Metallica’s records so it was a real breakthrough for a metal band from the reservation.

But the best part of it all is the just raw energy and love that all of the bands and their fans have for the music, which is hugely popular among Diné youth. Their shows are in tiny DIY rock clubs and sometimes fairgrounds, but they also do these Rez house concerts where they literally just set up and shred in people’s living rooms. My favorite little detail is that there is a popular band called Testify, and the drummer is Edmund Yazzie, who is the singer’s dad and also a member of the Navajo Council. It is such an awesome fucking scene that provides a much needed outlet for people. As the DJ at one Gallup radio station says, “What does metal mean to me? Metal is justice.”

I figured I would link a song by I Don’t Konform from their album Sagebrush Rejects, which has an incredible album cover (below), and has some great songs including the title track and “Hungry for War” and the Andrew W.K.-like anthem “WE R I.D.K.” But the most appropriate song for Crisis Palace is hands down “Environmental Punk Asses (E.P.A.)” Enjoy.

You can stream IDK on all platforms and they have a Facebook account that’s updated with dates and clips, they play around Phoenix for AZ readers. You can also donate to the Native American Music Fund, which is featured in Rez Metal.

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No links today got a late start and have run out of steam. I guess I would be curious to know what you all think about air conditioning. Do you use it? Do you feel guilty about it? Do you feel guilty about not feeling guilty about it? Are you reading this from inside of an air conditioned baseball stadium’s hot tub and couldn’t give a shit?

I do have an update on our senile dog, aka my elderly son. And that is, he is doing much better. Some time with the grandparents really helped his schedule and we’ve managed to keep him on track so much better sleep at night. But then he did have to go to the emergency vet last week because he had blood in his pee and then turned out he needed an enema it was this whole thing. He’s better now.

Jamie also had to go to a dermatologist and the one she picked was named I’m not making this up Doctor Doktor and I thought Jamie should walk in and sing Doctor Doktor give me the news I got a bad case of allergic reaction to sunscreen! But I don’t know she’s probably heard all the jokes so better to just be respectful of Dr Dr.

And now I’m basically just typing a bunch of stuff about doctor visits which is probably some kind of HIPAA violation so I will stop. I hope you and your dogs are staying healthy out there and that this newsletter is like a refreshing breeze.

Tate