‘Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice’
The butterflies of the British Isles /.London :F. Warne,1906.
Well it has been another rough week and I will link to related stories below but I wanted to get down some more thoughts on Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, King’s classic 1967 book on racial and economic justice, which I finished reading a couple days ago. You will not be suprised to hear that so many of the book’s ideas on race and power remain extremely relevant, and I hope you find them as helpful as I do during these truly fucked up times.
Where Do We Go from Here is Martin Luther King, Jr.’s fourth and final book, published the year before he was assassinated. At this point in his life, King had seen nonviolent resistance achieve huge strides in fighting overt racism in the South, but felt momentum slowing as SCLC turned much of its attention to problems like labor rights, economic injustice, and urban segregation in the North. At the same time, he was responding to growing frustration and calls for violent revolution within the movement, which he disagreed with, but also sympathized with. As a result, it’s a book laced with a certain amount of disappointment, but King meets it with a recommitment to his practice of love and nonviolent resistance.
Last week, I talked a little about King’s dedication to these principles, but it’s also important to note that they sometimes get twisted up in America’s fraught relationship with his legacy. White people tend to extract King’s least challenging ideas of love and reconciliation, often using his words to call for deescalation of racial tension, running counter to King’s actual theory of change. I don’t think our tendency to cling to his sentiments about love and empathy is necessarily sinister, though, as they are extremely powerful. Take, for example, from Where Do We Go From Here: “The universe is so structured that things go awry if men are not diligent in their cultivation of the other-regarding dimension. ‘I’ cannot reach fulfillment without ‘thou.’ The self cannot be self without other selves.”
But make no mistake, King was a radical and harbored no rosy illusions about racism in America, or what it would take to overcome it. That comes across loud and clear here, a book that starts out being about love, but pivots into a book mostly about power, and then finally, about economic redistribution.
Here’s where he makes the first turn:
[P]ower is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice. One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love.
What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love. There is nothing essentially wrong with power.
This focus on power emerges from King’s deep concerns over what he sees as stalled progress in advancing civil rights beyond ending Jim Crow and toward issues like housing, education, and labor. In a way, these are more difficult problems, but they are also battlegrounds that white liberals in the 1960s decided they were not willing to venture into.
White America was ready to demand that the Negro should be spared the lash of brutality and coarse degradation, but it had never been truly committed to helping him out of poverty, exploitation or all forms of discrimination. … White Americans left the Negro on the ground and in devastating numbers walked off with the aggressor. It appeared that the white segregationist and the ordinary white citizen had more in common with one another than either had with the Negro. When Negroes looked for the second phase, the realization of equality, they found that many of their white allies had quietly disappeared.
This feels relevant to today because, well, we have still not made a lot of progress on the realization of equality and have, by many measures, moved backwards. On racial justice specifically we are at a point when a resurgence or at least a renewed realization via smartphone videos of “brutality and coarse degradation” has drawn people of all races back into the streets in large numbers. But racial justice movements will learn soon enough if these allies have joined the fight for good this time.
King says that requires more than a surge of support in any one moment, and instead a multitiered building and leveraging of power—“a confrontation between the forces of power demanding change and the forces of power dedicated to preserving the status quo. Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose.” For King, it’s not a birthright or some ethereal element, but a substance to acquire and use through many avenues.
The fact that justice is not achieved without relentless effort is a sentiment that is counter to a common misrepresentation of King, one often perpetuated, unfortunately, by President Obama, who leaned heavily on the Facebook-friendly quote, “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Those close to King have pointed out that this quote is taken out of context, intended as a Christian sentiment of faith as opposed to a political mantra of preordained progress. Regardless, King makes it clear that justice is no inevitability (my emphasis):
We will be greatly misled if we feel that the problem will work itself out. Structures of evil do not crumble by passive waiting. If history teaches anything, it is that evil is recalcitrant and determined, and never voluntarily relinquishes its hold short of an almost fanatical resistance. Evil must be attacked by a counteracting persistence, by the day-to-day assault of the battering rams of justice. We must get rid of the false notion that there is some miraculous quality in the flow of time that inevitably heals all evils. …
Equally fallacious is the notion that ethical appeals and persuasion alone will bring about justice. This does not mean that ethical appeals must not be made. It simply means that those appeals must be undergirded by some form of constructive coercive power.
King here also revisits one of his most powerful ideas from 1963’s Letter From a Birmingham Jail, about the preference white moderates have for “negative peace which is the absence of tension” instead of “a positive peace which is the presence of justice.” Calling for escalation of constructive nonviolent tension, King writes, “The white liberal must rid himself of the notion that there can be a tensionless transition from the old order of injustice to the new order of justice.”
The book continues with a concrete application of these ideas, outlining the avenues for building power in American society—ideological, economic, and political. The modern experession of King’s ideological power might best be viewed through the way the concept of Black Lives Matter has reshaped much of white America’s thinking on policing. He describes economic power in terms of the effectiveness of boycotts and purchasing power, along with an intersectional view of economic justice, particularly through building powerful multiracial labor unions. And finally, political power, which includes voting, forming organizations and alliances, and developing leaders.
Toward the end, the book gives much weight to economic justice, calling for a universal income that tracks with the median income of society, as a way to overcome the failure of piecemeal policy changes. This section feels heavily influential on modern thought about the devastations of poverty, the failure of work to provide our lives with meaning, and even recognition that technology will not set us free. On the cruelty of inequality, he laments that we “compress our abundance into the overfed mouths of the middle and upper classes until they gag with superfluity.”
King champions redistribution and federal spending programs, leveling unflinching blows to capitalism, and in the depths of the Cold War and Vietnam War, castigates American military action against communist nations. But he also makes clear that he’s not a Marxist either, in one section that I found illuminating and will close with. This reminds me of adrienne maree brown’s thoughts on capitalism and the need to break free of the economic molds of the past. King writes:
Truth is found neither in traditional capitalism nor in classical Communism. Each represents a partial truth. Capitalism fails to see the truth in collectivism. Communism fails to see the truth in individualism. Capitalism fails to realize that life is social. Communism fails to realize that life is personal. The good and just society is neither the thesis of capitalism nor the antithesis of Communism, but a socially conscious democracy which reconciles the truths of individualism and collectivism.
Links
The men who killed a person named Breonna Taylor in her own home will face no charges, except for one of them because bullets from his gun hit a neighbor’s wall. Rep. Attica Scott, the only Black woman in the Kentucky legislature, who is pursuing subtantive police reform, was arrested while protesting the decision. She faces felony charges.
Trump is laying the groundwork to declare an American presidential election illegitimate if he loses, and not just in his statements to the press. This Atlantic article makes the case that the problem is less about whether he concedes (which he never will) and more about all the hand grenades the administration is throwing into the election process to build a legal case for dismissing its results. This is a very real possibility, beyond the fact that it is already trashing our remaining democratic institutions. You can read more takes on this here, here, and here.
If this is an outcome that you would like to avoid, vote in person or hand deliver your mail in ballot as early as possible and do not vote for Donald Trump obviously, and then get ready for sustained protest.
Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan says Chris Wallace should rewrite his list of debate topics and put climate change right at the top.
Breaking Bad was a masterpiece of character study and serial storytelling, but it always felt a little light to me on larger themes beyond those inside Walter White’s head. In season four of Better Call Saul, the prequel spinoff might have outpaced the source material by taking on a sharper social critique, particularly of the legal system. It’s also just super funny and suspenseful and a great show. It’s all good man.
And that’s what I got this week, a review of a 53-year-old book hope you enjoyed it. Not a lot of jokes. Not many jokes coming out of the old jokatron 2000 this round.
I do want to talk about walking around my neighborhood at night again. Something about this time of year means that while I don’t see a ton of stars, I can see three planets very clearly: Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. I’m not really into astrology, but for some reason seeing them every night like this makes it really clear to me why there is this whole life philosophy that has developed over millennia based on these sparkly thingys that hang in sky and move ever so gradually into different formations as the seasons change. Anyway, I enjoy seeing them, hello planets, how is Sagittarius treating you tonight glad to hear it.
I also enjoy seeing weird behavior in the neighborhood after dark, like the other day I stumbled upon a grown adult tightly bundled in a mummy sleeping bag on their front lawn, having a conversation with someone else sitting on the porch.
Also a lot of hanging strings of lights are going up in back and front yards throughout the neighborhood, I imagine to brace for the long march into darkness. We’re going to put a string of solar-powered cafe lights up over our own back porch this weekend, joining the club. Whatever unique chaos is happening in the moment, here we are all sitting under these sparkly things hanging in the sky, going through it separately but together.
The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows—a wall against the wind
Key-west Dove from Birds of America (1827) by John James Audubon, etched by William Home Lizars.
I was talking in therapy the other day about anger and how it can be both a positive and a negative force in our lives, and how even fully righteous anger frequently turns destructive, especially coming from white guys like yours truly. (The writer Anoosh Jorjorian wrote a good post on this topic, reminding her white allies that “our anger isn’t yours. It doesn’t belong to you.”) I think there’s a tendency among both media people and people on the left to come off as especially angry or snarky or sometimes downright seething, almost as a point of pride. I think in my own writing or just in daily life, I’m wary of my tendency to have this kind of ah you know what fuck this guy attitude if I see someone as enabling harm or holding up progress in some way, which can honestly be a daunting array of individuals at which to focus my rage.
Sometimes expressing anger is a very appropriate course correction, an attempt to get to some emotional honesty, and some of us are unquestionably entitled to that anger, see above. But I also recognize a danger in overindulging the you know what fuck that guy attitude, because in any democratic society or even social movement, we have to exist in the same spaces as a lot of people who have done or believed some very shitty things (sometimes those people are even ourselves!). So we get this tension between burning righteous anger and wanting to hold people accountable for antisocial actions, and the reality of how society has to function but also how social change happens.
Two ways that people reconcile this conflict are through the related theories of nonviolence and restorative justice, which I’ve been thinking about a lot this week. These practices are usually framed in terms of confronting state violence and criminal activity, respectively. But they have much to offer in helping us make the pivot from anger toward a version of true justice, in the way they shift focus from force and punishment and toward healing a rift in community.
I wrote a while back about nonviolent resistance in the work of Erica Chenoweth, but I’m trying to learn more about the philosophy itself and am currently reading Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community. This topic has also been on my mind this week while listening to interviews with Bryan Stevenson and sujatha baliga, and reading an article by Ezra Klein (sorry this is one is kind of heavy on Ezra Klein, who Jamie lovingly refers to as my boyfriend) about what a nonviolent state might look like. A couple of concepts in these texts really jumped out.
The first is that nonviolence and restorative justice (I’m going to use them both in the same breath a lot even though they are different things you’ll just have to google it sorry) are both often mistakenly thought of as philosophies of passivity—of not doing anything. Not punishing. Not challenging. Not fighting. But nonviolence is different from simply not being violent, and in fact, you could be a practitioner of nonviolence while not even being morally opposed to the use of violence. That’s because, as Klein puts it, nonviolence, “is a strategic confrontation with other human beings.” A tool you choose because it is powerful in disarming those who do harm. Similarly, restorative justice is not defined by a lack of holding people responsible. Rather, it is a move away from punishment, namely incarceration, and toward achieving accountability and making whole again those who have been harmed—both the direct victim of the crime and the community.
In both cases, they are attacks on the flawed practices of state violence and incarceration, both of which create greater harm than they prevent. There’s substantial empiricalevidence that both practices are more effective than violence and incarceration in preventing future acts of violence. In other words, we’re not talking about merely turning the other cheek, although that may be what it involves in practice, but about repairing a problem.
So that’s one thing to recognize—just because you’re not striking out in anger doesn’t mean you’re not confronting wrongs being committed.
Another is that both practices emphasize achieving justice, in part, through bringing an opponent or non-ally into a community that is seeking it, which is a really powerful and practical concept. As sujatha baliga points out, restorative justice acknowledges that, even in an incarceral state like the US, the perpetrator of a crime is not forever removed from society. We have to live with them, so the goal instead is to make it so they won’t hurt others in the future.
Similarly, King, writing in 1967 when civil rights activists including himself were losing patience with white moderates and false allies, insists that justice cannot be achieved for Black Americans without white Americans. He describes a “double lock of peaceful change,” with one key in the hands of the Black community and the other in the hands of the white community, and quotes Baldwin telling his nephew that “white Americans are your lost, younger brothers.” Just as the fates of the perpetrator and the victim are intertwined, in America, King suggests, so are the fates of the oppressor and the oppressed.
Bryan Stevenson makes it clear that a focus on healing does not mean shrugging off injustice. For Stevenson, a mandatory step on the way to reconciliation is truth-telling, something that the United States is particularly bad at when it comes to its past atrocities, as evidenced by our future school curriculum about how awesome America is. And even after truth-telling, there are many steps along the way before we reach forgiveness.
These ideas have been around for a very long time, but I’ve been thinking about how important they are when we are so extremely angry at out neighbors, for very good reason, and how these lessons can be applied to many social movements. In the fight for racial justice or climate action or public health, the change that is necessary can’t be achieved without making allies of people who were once your opponents, or at least non-allies. The math just doesn’t work, otherwise. That is a hard reality to face, and activists often resist it with all their might. White activists, in particular, often don’t want to organize middle-class white people or rural people, or work with peers we believe are too moderate or have flawed politics or are otherwise problematic. And I know not everyone’s offenses are equal and not everyone will or should be an ally. But as Chris Crass says, “We need millions of people in motion for justice and we are going to bring all of our contradictions with us. If you don’t want messy, you don’t want mass.”
In the words of seminal restorative justice thinker Don Henley, I’m still trying to get down to the heart of the matter, and my will gets weak and my thoughts seem to scatter, but I think it’s about forgiveness. But maybe not forgiveness right away. First confrontation, truth-telling, and accountability. Then maybe we can close the rift.
Links
Excited that Michelle Wu is running for mayor of Boston. As city councilor, she campaigned to make the MBTA free, abolish the BPDA, and cut police funding.
A National Guard whistleblower revealed that when responding to racial justice protestors in DC, federal officials stockpiled ammunition and tried to get access to a “heat ray” previously deemed unethical to use in war zones.
Trump’s environmental rollbacks so far will result in additional climate change emissions equivalent to what Germany, Britain, and Canada combined put out in a year.
There is a feeling of “impending doom” in Boston about the approach of winter. “Anybody who says they aren’t feeling anxiety or depression right now is lying to you.”
OK so this is a criticism of the media’s coverage of Trump but it is also a scorching assessment of the overall state of the union. “It’s a country with the world’s highest GDP, where 40 million people live below the poverty line. The only industrialised nation on the planet without universal healthcare, any real social welfare system or decent retirement provisions. The only free nation where 1 in 40 adults are behind bars and which has more guns in circulation than people living within its borders.”
Reading
My friends I have to tell you one problem I have is that there are approximately 1 million books I need to read and I just do not have time to read them and I also do not read fast enough. All of this is complicated by my decision to finally get around to reading Frank Herbert’s Dune, which is like 600 pages of mostly made up words, but you know what here we go. When I am done I look forward to telling people that I liked the movie better.
I’ve only just started it, but here’s a nice Crisis Palacey quote: “That which submits rules… The willow submits to the wind and prospers until one day it is many willows—a wall against the wind. This is the willow’s purpose.”
Ice-T was recently on Marc Maron’s podcast, and it was a good interview and reminded me of when I was a suburban teen in Phoenix listening to West Coast rap and Ice-T was my favorite. New Jack Hustler is probably my favorite track, but I feel like this one is very much on theme these days, a song from 1991 by his then-side project, Body Count, which is still recording and touring today. This song, as you might imagine, has explicit lyrics.
Speaking of anger, the other evening I was on the couch after a long day and I was like, you know what, I’ve never listened to that Metallica record St. Anger that everyone hates so much because the snare sounds awful so I put it on in my headphones. It was, in fact, pretty awful so for a palate cleanser I put on Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All from 1983 and bizarrely fell asleep on the first track. I woke up a little later with it still on and was so disoriented it was like I was coming out of a fever. What a strange nap, can’t say I recommend.
I do recommend naps in general though. In fact, once you’ve finished this week’s newsletter, close your eyes, take a couple of deep breaths, and try to drift away for a little while. As I am just about to hit send, it looks as though some new wave of dark shit is erupting out there, so right in this minute, just think about those key west doves at the top of the email and let it all go. You keep carrying around that anger, it will eat you up inside.
Well every month it seems some fresh serving of hell is delivered up as a reminder, in case it was not clear already, that we are really in the shit now. I think it was just last week that I linked to an article that was headlined “California’s Apocalyptic August,” and not halfway into September we’re seeing images from the West Coast of the sun blotted out by wildfire smoke and ash. One of the difficulties with selling people on climate change for the past several decades was the lack of defining lines that demarcate success or failure, arrival or avoidance, but the nature of the crisis is that things we’ve always had to deal with become intensified, and things that were once freak occurrences steadily become routine events, and then one day, here we are.
I try to not make this newsletter a weekly laundry list of awful things happening although sometimes I guess that’s the laundry list you’re dealt for the week. So right now we’re seeing what could be the biggest wildfire outbreak in the US since 1910, which has consumed more than 3 million acres in California and almost a million in Oregon. Six of the 20 largest wildfires in California history started in August and September. Towns have been destroyed, hundreds of homes lost, and locals are describing it as “apocalyptic,” leaving even experts “searching for stronger superlatives.”
Wildfires are one of the clearest examples of the consequences of climate change, with hotter temperatures, longer summers, drier conditions, and less snowpack leading to bigger and faster-moving fires. In Oregon right now, one frightening hallmark of the fires is their remarkable speed, moving through timber at a pace you usually only see in grassland fires. Dry winds are leading to “extreme fire behavior” including “mushroom cloud-like plumes of smoke that reach 40,000 feet in height.”
Climate change is a crisis of recurring and concurrent disasters, so these stories always sound familiar because something similar happened just a couple years ago or even within this year in different location like Australia, and it used to only get this bad every 5 or 10 years maybe. And alongside this wildfire season alone, the Midwest was hit by a violent storm with hurricane-force winds called a derecho, Hurricane Laura hammered the Gulf Coast, the Southwest is experiencing drought conditions, and my hometown of Phoenix is about to wrap up the hottest summer ever recorded.
I remember reading somewhere that scientists tend to be far more measured in the descriptions of what they study than the press or the public—except when it comes to climate change, where the experts are almost always far more freaked out than the rest of us. Annie Lowery has a great article that I will also blurb below, but has this particularly upsetting quote from NASA climate scientist Peter Kalmus:
I am absolutely terrified. What’s happening to the Earth system, it is happening so much faster than I thought it would,” said Kalmus of NASA. “The observations, the interpretations, the projections from the climate model—when I translate that into the emotional part of my brain, what I feel is panic and terror. I struggle to breathe sometimes. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I just feel like there’s no place to hide. I can’t do enough to wake people up.”
For a long time, I feel like there was this sense that climate change was always something that would arrive decades from now, perhaps in the year 2050 or beyond, hence the hollow climate pledges to do X by some much later date without the radical steps needed to hit that target. But that date sure seems to be looking like it is actually this date as in today.
One of the ways it is unfolding in front of us is by forcing people to move, in the most literal sense of having to go from one place to another with no choice in the matter, temporarily or permanently. This is an impact that also gets talked about in big, distant terms, as in this new report that projects 1.2 billion people could be displaced by 2050 (there’s that 2050 number again). But two days ago, tens of thousands of people were ordered to evacuate Medford, Oregon. Depending on the disaster we are fleeing, sometimes there’s no home to return to, or no job to return to, or sometimes people try to escape but are not allowed. I keep thinking back to that mental image of New Orleans post-Katrina, of families attempting to walk across the river to a nearby suburb for dry land only to be greeted by the sheriff and a group of men forming a blockade to stop them.
To see what climate migration looks like, we can look to present day Louisiana. Since Katrina in 2005, every one of Louisiana’s 64 parishes has been included in a federal major disaster declaration, with large swaths being swallowed up by the Gulf. Back in April I wrote about the work of an organization called Foundation for Louisiana, which helped fund and organize a community-driven process that resulted in a plan for regional adaptation, published in 2019. (Quartz recently ran an article on the same issue and planning process, and it is a good read.)
When I talked with the team at FFL, they were explaining to me all of the ripple effects of climate migration they were dealing with in Louisiana’s communities. For example, vulnerable areas don’t entirely close down—rather, some portion of the houses may be safely elevated, while some other portion may have to be evacuated. That leaves a partly hollowed out neighborhood where the number of people shrinks, as does the tax base, along with infrastructure, schools, resources and social services, in the places that need help the most. There’s also a huge cultural and psychological impact—there’s the stress of being forced from your home, but also imagine some significant percentage of your neighbors disappearing. It can shred a neighborhood’s social fabric and fuel anxiety. At the same time, so-called “receiver communities” on higher ground may see their populations boom, overwhelming their own infrastructure. So one thing about the LASAFE process is that it funds projects like green infrastructure and flood control measures, but also mental health centers and efforts to preserve local arts and culture.
All of this is to say that, when we think about climate migration, maybe places like the Maldives come to mind, or populations fleeing famine-stricken areas in poor countries in years to come. But we’re also talking about psychological trauma, unemployment, loss of community, all happening right now in the United States.
One more thing on this topic, I recently did some consulting on a report about city resilience in Massachusetts (I’ll email it to you if you want to read it). One of the biggest points was that there needs to be a shift in how we think about climate resilience. Right now, the common perception is stuck in the realm of infrastructure—sea walls and city planning departments, depressing, distant work done by engineers and policymakers. When in reality, climate resilience is a social problem that encompasses public health, housing, transportation, racial equity, and more. It requires collective action and needs to center those who are closest to the problem in planning efforts.
To make that shift, we need to draw clear connections between climate change and how it is impacting people’s lives. I don’t think we know what a climate resilient community looks like at this point, and that’s part of the difficulty in planning them. But we don’t have to imagine the distant future to understand what the human impact looks like; we just have to ask the right people, right now.
Links
Here’s that really good Annie Lowery article. I have written here a couple of times about how individual action on climate change is important, even though it’s corporations and governments that need to change. This kind of goes against the climate activist gospel these days but it has to do with social pressure and movement building, and the fact that individual action doesn’t actually distract from collective action.
This is the other must read this week, on how the SUV took over the world and became a major source of traffic fatalities and climate change. “They are killing machines. They cause a lot of damage to the global climate, to air quality and to the people they hit. SUVs are terrible for cities and neighborhoods, they serve no purpose there. You don’t need them to run to the store to buy a gallon of milk.”
Eric Holthaus, a climate writer I like, is leaving The Correspondent, and his goodbye note had some nice takeaways, including: “The climate emergency isn’t the main story, it’s a symptom of the main story” and “Climate dystopia is a choice.”
People keep saying that the pandemic is sending people fleeing cities for the suburbs, but the evidence doesn’t support it.
The landlord of a craft brewery in Jamaica Plain is suing to stop a new affordable housing project because he says there is not enough parking. Turtle Swamp Brewery says they have nothing to do with it but did take a moment to complain about the development projects, you know generally speaking, in the area.
“Pedestrian infrastructure” is a lie in that it is really just little features added on in order to justify more single-passenger vehicle infrastructure.
OK that’s good for today sorry this one was a little meandering what can I say it’s a topsy turvy time to be alive. We did however recently celebrate Jamie’s birthday, which included many gifts, a signature cocktail, and a meatless charcuterie board that turned out so great that I am considering maybe that is what I should be doing for a living so hit me up if you’re interested but my rates are honestly not reasonable at all.
We also went kayaking on the Charles which is a safe and healthy pandemic-era activity that I would recommend. It was my second time kayaking and I am bad at it, but it’s still nice you get some spectacular views of the city. We did crash into things a couple of times, including one time we crashed into a canal wall while trying to avoid a duck boat tour. Afterwards, I told Jamie those tourists were probably all laughing at us and she said yeah I’m sure they were. “Well you know what,” I said, “they can shove it up their asses” and we had a pretty good laugh.
Keep paddling down that river everyone, even if everything around you is on fire. And if any boat full of tourists tries to crash your little kayak and then laughs at you I have your back and they will not get away with it.
The lie that’s told to us over and over again that without oppression we are monsters
Monograph of the Paradiseidae, or birds of paradise and Ptilonorhynchidae, or bower-birds.London :H. Sotheran & Co.,1891-98.
CW: There’s a brief reference to sexual violence in this one.
When we talk about writers exhibiting prescience in their work, I think it actually undervalues what it is that they are doing as a kind of lucky guess or knack for predicting. I say undervaluing, because what actually seems to be happening here is that these people are exhibiting an understanding of certain core natures of humanity or the world—deep truths that exist outside of time and dependably resurface.
I was feeling a lot of these truths some of which were preeeetty sucky back in early 2017 when I first read Rebecca Solnit’s 2004 book Hope in the Dark, which comments largely on the Iraq war and the Bush era, but post-2016 election felt like she was writing directly to me, right when I was reading it, about our current political hell and where to find hope. And I had a very similar experience recently reading Solnit’s 2010 book A Paradise Built in Hell, which is about human nature during disaster.
I’m a pretty big fan of Rebecca Solnit for a lot of reasons, one of which is the way she uses form and genre. She combines elements of straight journalism, commentary, and lyrical personal essay into this layered version of creative nonfiction that feels modern and sometimes bloggy but also kind of timeless. I also find Solnit’s prose challenging in a really good way, in that she punctuates her just-the-facts retellings with these beautifully crafted sentences that are full of meaning and reward revisiting.
Anyway I talked a little bit about the book in a past issue, but we’re back for another episode of the Solnit Corner today to get into its core themes, specifically the false narrative of human savagery, and the way catastrophe is compounded by panic among elites.
The book is basically a history of human response to disaster and the field of disaster studies within sociology. The core argument challenges the Hobbesian belief that humanity by nature is violent and self-serving, and that disasters peel away the thin veneer of civilization and send us into a state of chaos and violence. In reality, Solnit and scholars cited in the book point to abundant evidence that “there are plural and contingent natures—but the prevalent human nature in disaster is resilient, resourceful, generous, empathic, and brave.”
More often than not, disaster leads us to call upon our best selves and form these impromptu utopias of collective caretaking and cashless mutual aid. In addition, what we believe about humanity—whether we consider it good and valuable or harmful and disposable—creates a self-fulfilling prophecy in how we behave toward each other during difficult times:
Katrina was an extreme version of what goes on in many disasters, wherein how you behave depends on whether you think your neighbors or fellow citizens are a greater threat than the havoc wrought by a disaster or a greater good than the property in houses and stores around you.
Solnit catalogues many catastrophes throughout history, which in itself is pretty fascinating (I knew nothing about the Halifax explosion of 1917), along with overlooked stories of neighbor-to-neighbor relief efforts in which people go above and beyond to help each other and experience moments of joy in doing so.
So that’s the running theme, but there are lots of eye-opening subtleties within it, largely around what is actually behind the violent conflict that does sometimes follow disaster. Solnit doesn’t claim that there is no bad behavior during disaster, merely that the fear of mass panic or a reversion to savagery is far overblown. Meanwhile, some of the worst violent offenses during catastrophe are carried out by the state, terrified of losing control, or by private property owners who turn on their neighbors out of fear of losing their possessions. She explores the idea of “elite panic” that emerges among the ruling classes:
Elites and authorities often fear the changes of disaster or anticipate that the change means chaos and destruction, or at least the undermining of the foundations of their power. So a power struggle often takes place in disaster—and real political and social change can result, from that struggle or from the new sense of self and society that emerges. Too, the elite often believe that if they themselves are not in control, the situation is out of control, and in their fear take repressive measures that become secondary disasters.
Elite panic usually emerges in fear of, above all else, property crime, even in situations where human life is at stake and commerce has become largely halted. Her retelling of police and federal troops shooting on sight or brutally arresting San Franciscans thought to be stealing from stores in the aftermath of the 1906 earthquake ring true in 2020.
I also like the way Solnit describes the good we do for each other, and the sharing or dissolving of ownership that happens in the face of disaster, not as an abnormality, but as a default setting that we fall back into when structures collapse. This brings to mind all of the cruel societal norms that many communities handily dissolved when the pandemic first took hold.
But the real centerpiece of the book, its most harrowing and thought-provoking section, is the revisiting of the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. While Solnit does recount the amazing acts of heroism and neighborly care that happened during the flooding, there’s also a dark story of how power structures responded to a mostly Black community in peril. “New Orleans was not just a catastrophe. It was a prison.”
It would have been bad enough if the Bush administration’s FEMA merely neglected the city, but national guard, local police, and hired mercenaries patrolled the streets treating victims as perpetrators. Authorities and the media helped stoke false rumors of violent chaos, including uncontrollable gang violence and rape of children and babies—stories that later were all but entirely debunked and retracted. Reports of homicidal rampage inside the Superdome eventually dwindled to a very small number of deaths, mostly from natural causes. But the message was already sent—this is what happens without law and order.
Meanwhile, fear and disdain toward Black families led to horrific mistreatment from both law enforcement and civilians. At one point, many could have walked right out of the city, across the river to the nearby suburb of Gretna, but the sheriff and a group of unidentified men with guns closed the bridge to pedestrians. “They responded that the West Bank was not going to become New Orleans,” one person recalls. Solnit refers to an earlier section on the aftermath of September 11, when thousands of New Yorkers peacefully fled on foot across the Brooklyn Bridge. She quotes Rev. Lennox Yearwood: “What if they had been met by six or eight police cars blocking the bridge, and cops fired warning shots to turn them back?”
Solnit also recounts a story that, working with The Nation and investigative reporter A.C. Thompson, she was able to break in 2008 after being turned away by mainstream news outlets. In the aftermath of Katrina, it was common knowledge that groups of white vigilantes were indiscriminately killing Black people under the banner of protecting private property. The reporting focused on the neighborhood of Algiers Point, a mostly white community that was largely spared by the hurricane. A group of white men in the neighborhood created an informal militia to seal off the area from people outside trying to find refuge there. Later they would speak without fear of consequence about committing multiple murders. One older man boasted, on video, “I never thought eleven months ago I’d be walking down the streets of New Orleans with two .38s and a shotgun over my shoulder. It was great. It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.”
Solnit’s tone is usually measured and empathetic, but here her rage is palpable, at the men, but also at authorities and journalists who ignored their actions, favoring horror stories of gangs in the Superdome. Katrina, she writes, did bring out the better nature of many people, but New Orleans was also robbed of the ability to find paradise in hell.
The most optimistic of all disaster scholars, Charles Fritz, had ascribed his positive disaster experiences only to those who are “permitted to interact freely and to make an unimpeded social adjustment.” This was hardly what happened in the first days and weeks of Katrina, when many felt abandoned, criminalized, imprisoned, cast out, and then like recipients of charity—or hate.
As I was finishing this book, I was also reading about dozens of cases of people driving cars into anti-racist protestors, and gangs of mostly white vigilantes in Philadelphia, referred to as the “bat boys” because they show up brandishing baseball bats, pipes, and golf clubs. They shout racial slurs at people and have been involved in several beatings, including breaking the nose of a public radio producer, all while describing their goal as protecting the neighborhood and local businesses from looting. Similar groups have surfaced elsewhere.
I really don’t want to focus too much or close with the story of these awful men but god it just feels gut-wrenchingly relevant right now and such a familiar story. Brownshirts, pinkertons, militias. In the 1990s, Octavia Butler wrote in her novels about “Jarret’s Crusaders,” acting on behalf of a fictional president whose slogan is “make America great again.”
Despite nominally being about paradise, Solnit’s book does not paint a rosy picture. The disasters she catalogs are horrible, and some people do horrible things in their aftermath. But the point she returns to repeatedly is that cruelty is not inevitable, nor is it the predominant response. The groups of marauding men are not who we are by default, and when they do emerge, they often look very different than common fears would suggest. Often they carry badges. Or golf clubs. And they are a product of a false belief about humanity—belief in a lie that’s told to us over and over again, that without oppression we are monsters.✓
Links
That biotech conference in Boston led to potentially 20,000 cases of coronavirus, according to genetic tracking, even reaching into local homeless shelters. A single wedding in Maine led to the state’s largest outbreak. And that is why we call it public health and not private health.
Donald Trump has carried out an unrelenting assault on public lands, emissions reductions, and environmental protections since taking office. “He has done more to roll back and weaken environmental laws and regulations than any president in history.”
Speaking of Trump, he also had some choice words for veterans, calling them “losers” and “suckers” and of John McCain, “Guy was a fucking loser.” “[Trump] can’t fathom the idea of doing something for someone other than himself.”
Speaking of all that who is voting this November I sure as fuck am. And past elections show that voting by mail doesn’t give either party an edge. But Trump constantly shit-talking voting by mail could depress the Republican vote in this election hey whatever it takes right.
Ed Markey beat a Kennedy in Massachusetts, thank god, suggesting both a rejection of dynasty politics and the power of the climate movement.
By fighting for African accents in Black Panther, instead of British accents as the studio wanted, Chadwick Boseman was fighting against the legacy of colonialism.
The oil and gas industry is flailing, with plunging prices and a glut of product. The latest plan? Flood Africa with plastic.
Everyone thought these cool singing dogs were extinct in the wild, but then they found a bunch in New Guinea.
Rob Delaney talks about his vasectomy, and why it was the least he could do (not for the squeamish and possibly nsfw).
Comics
Before the pandemic, I picked up a bunch of old Jack Kirby anthologies at the library. I will defensively point out that I’m not really the kind of comics fan who sits around reading old superhero comics. And I really hate the Kevin Smith character version of comic book fans. I have no undying devotion to Stan Lee or his stupid cameos RIP. I don’t care who would win in imaginary fights. But boy do I love looking at Jack Kirby drawings.
One anthology I’m reading now is of his oldest work for Marvel. The first half or so was kind of underwhelming, some early capes stuff, war comics, westerns. But then comes Fantastic Four 48, 49, and 50 from 1966 and oh my god. Only the second work in the book featuring Kirby’s pencils with Joe Sinnott’s inks and there is something about the combination of those two and the subject matter, which is the introduction of Silver Surfer and Galactus.
Something happened to Kirby’s style where he doubled down on these super heavy black outlines and overly dramatic facial expressions and various lines and shapes that represent motion and cosmic energy. It is weird, technicolor, psychedelic stuff and I can’t believe little kids with slingshots in their back pockets and a dog with a spot over his eye or whatever were sitting around looking at this on the playground or hidden inside a math book.
Anyway Indiana Jones voice it belongs in a museum and you can get an original copy of #49 on ebay for just $9,000.
Listening
Every night I take a walk through my neighborhood. As much as I enjoy the afternoon howdy neighbor stroll with the dogs, after dark it’s a calmer experience and I can walk around maskless for the most part and not feel like an asshole, avoiding seeing more than a couple of people from a distance. I like to check out the exteriors of houses, and the different ways people are communicating their values and states of mind through them.
Mostly BLM, local election signs, thank you frontline workers signs, American flags. For a while there were a lot of chalk messages kids would leave for their friends. Every now and then you see a yard display that is unintentionally funny and/or horrifying. Like earlier in the week, I noticed this scene outside a fancy house (where I live it is like half-fancy, half-not so fancy you can guess which one we are).
On the left is a fairly innocuous laundry list of liberal values seen often in the neighborhoods of Boston. But just to the right is a sign advertising to passersby that this house is protected by SimpliSafe, a local security company owned by a notorious Trump supporter who treats his staff like shit. So yes of course we believe black lives matter but there is also a camera watching you right now so please stay the fuck off my property or an underpaid person in a call center somewhere will alert the police.
Anyway just wanted to share that cranky little tidbit before wrapping up. I also saw this week outside of a new fourplex an aggressive series of no fewer than five large flags, including your vanilla American flag, the fascist-adjacent “blue line” American flag, an Irish flag, and a Canadian flag. So just a friendly way to let the new neighbors know that you are white and perhaps have a certain amount of, what’s the word, pride about it.
Quite a time to be alive my friends. You know what? If it were logistically possible and my landlord would allow it, I would put flags up outside my house, one for each of you, with your beautiful faces on them. This is the better world I dream of.
Things we consider to be matters of personal choice have implications far beyond personal well-being
Termitenhugel in Sennar. Illustration for Brehms Thierleben Allgemeine Kunde des Thierreichs (Bibliographischen Instituts, c 1880–90).
For the past 72 years and counting, epidemiologists have been monitoring the behavior and health of thousands of individuals over long periods of time in the unassuming town of Framingham, Massachusetts, which is just about 20 miles west of my house. The now-famous Framingham Heart Study began in 1948 in order to shed light on the causes of coronary heart disease, of which researchers knew very little at the time. The cohort began with 5,209 volunteers, and is now on its fourth generation of participants.
The study is one of the most fruitful in medical research history, and in 1961, identified major risk factors for heart disease that still guide prevention and treatment. But as different resarchers dug around in the heaps of data Framingham has emitted over the decades, they also began to find some unexpected phenomena regarding social networks. Specifically, that the actions of people surrounding an individual were strongly correlated with the individual’s own actions.
So when it comes to unhealthy risk factors, the data has shown that if your spouse, friends, and co-workers, say, smoke cigarettes, your likelihood of smoking significantly goes up, like way up. Same thing if they quit. That’s maybe not that surprising, but the effects reach even beyond people you know, as far out as three degrees of separation (the friends of your friends’ friends).
What that means is that behaviors of people you don’t even know change the probabilities that you’ll behave in certain ways. Only at four degrees of separation do the network effects become negligible. Even as national rates of smoking declined over the years, clusters of smokers continued smoking, suggesting that people were quitting, or not quitting, based on their own networks’ behavior. Similar outcomes have been observed surrrounding obesity rates and even happiness.
I think about this study a lot because, for one, it suggests that our lives, actions, feelings are much more a product of the collective than we might tell ourselves. So from a public health standpoint, it suggests that things we might consider to be merely matters of personal choice have implications far beyond personal well-being. It also challenges the idea that, in order to change societal behavior, you merely need to appeal to individual preferences or self interest.
This last idea has been the research focus of the somewhat rogue economist Robert H. Frank, who has been hammering on the idea that social pressure is a far more powerful tool than self-interest when it comes to incentivizing certain behaviors, and you can apply that pressure strategically. Frank has a new book out on the topic, and recently made this case in the New York Times regarding climate change and carbon taxes.
In his Times column, Frank points out that sky-high taxes on cigarettes actually didn’t change most smokers’ behavior. They liked smoking, after all, and it was a cool thing to do. But a small minority did quit as a result, and that sparked “behavioral contagion,” which is what actually drove down smoking rates over the years in the US. Over time, laws prohibiting smoking took hold, but the social attitudes changed first. Smoking is now anything but cool and when people who are definitely not me sneak a drag they do it in shame and isolation. Frank suggests that a revenue-neutral carbon tax (this means you tax and give the money back to the public to spend) would influence the behavior of a small number of households, but that would then spread like wildfire or like infectious disease two metaphors that you perhaps have some familiarity with right now. He cites a 2012 study that suggests if one family installs solar panels, one neighbor will see the panels and follow suit within four months, then two more, and on and on and on.
Frank’s insights run a lot deeper than my own explanation here, and I really like and generally agree with his thoughts on behavior and social pressure—except for this particular policy solution, which I think amounts to “pass a law people don’t like and over time they will start to like it.” To me, behavioral contagion is more of an argument for movement building and cultural organizing (arts, media, etc). If you can leverage these intense social currents, the potential power is such that you can blow way past weaksauce legislation like a revenue-neutral carbon tax and get to actual transformation.
(I am aware here that my own social network is probably influencing that conclusion just like Frank’s is influencing his, but that’s a little too far down the well let’s just back away from that.)
I imagine there are a lot of ways you could build that social pressure, but one in particular that the Framingham study and Frank’s work make me think about is communicating online. The kind of activity that is often referred to, almost always derogatorily, as “virtue signaling,” as in wanting to demonstrate to your peers on social media that you are a good person. At its worst, the term is used to shit on people for caring about something. Sometimes it’s more of a competitive sentiment that someone doesn’t really care about a thing that you care about.
If we are friends on Facebook you will already be aware that I am actually a big fan of virtue signaling so sorry about that I guess. Literally the only things I share on Facebook are this newsletter (which is at times a form of virtue signaling itself), and photos from some kind of protest or activist thingy. This is entirely intentional, in the way that many forms of activism, like public protest, are largely about sending signals. A signal of potential democratic power, a signal of growing discontent, and yes, a signal of a shared virtue. So I am hoping that people I went to high school with, people I used to work with, people in my family who have not unfollowed me, will at least casually notice that XYZ is a thing that I care about. Not because I’m so awesome or that people should give a shit about what I think, but merely because I am a person in their social network.
In her great book on social movments that I reference here often, Twitter and Tear Gas, sociologist Zeynep Tufekci defends what was often called in the late 2000s “clicktivism” or “slactivism,” first by challenging the very idea that the online world is separate from the real world, noting that it often reflects actions also happening in the physical world. She then points out that,
When Facebook friends change their avatar to protest discrimination against gay people, they also send a cultural signal to their social networks, and over time, such signals are part of what makes social change possible by changing culture. Many protesters I talked with cite their online political interactions as the beginning of their process of becoming politicized.
Critics of online political expression and organizing (rhymes with Smalcolm Smadwell) claim that such platforms rely too heavily on “weak ties,” which don’t yield meaningful action. But Tufekci counters that, “for people seeking political change, though, the networking that takes place among people with weak ties is especially important.” People with strong ties already share similar views; it’s the weak ties that “may create bridges to other clusters of people in a way that strong ties do not.” Social scientists call these connections “bridge ties” and “weak ties are more likely to be bridges between disparate groups.”
In other words, a bridge tie is the friend of the friend of the friend who quits smoking, and influences whether or not your immediate cluster quits too. In Egypt, during the Arab Spring, Tufekci documents how, as these online, symbolic actions piled up, it “created a new baseline for common knowledge of the political situation…not just what you knew, but also what others knew you knew, and so on—that shifted the acceptable boundaries of discourse.”
None of these signals have to be shared online, of course. And what I don’t know, and maybe nobody knows, is how the manner in which these signals are sent influences people. There’s some evidence that trying to convince others of something often has the opposite effect so I don’t know maybe don’t try to do that. And let’s face it, this stuff can be kind of annoying. Even on an issue you care deeply about, one can only handle so many text-on-pastel-background Instagram stories. There’s also the fact that, given the gravity and emotional intensity of what is happening in the country—the latest police murder of Jacob Blake, racists driving cars into crowds, a 17-year-old Trump supporter with an AR-15 killing anti-racist demonstrators—a status update can feel pitifully insufficient, a mismatch.
But I do think that sharing what you believe, talking about your politics or race or climate change online and offline, saying out loud what makes you angry or sad or hopeful, has a contagious effect. Because we are social networks and not mere collections of individuals, the sentiments that you share are not just your own, but one part of the collective sentiments of a whole.
These symbolic actions are not the entirety of activism, by any means, but they are part of it. Like the teens wearing green bandanas in modern-day Argentina, or professionals and working class people shouting anti-Shah slogans from their rooftops at night during the Iranian Revolution, then going to work in the morning. These actions signal not only mere personal virtue, but social virtue—that something that was once tolerable will no longer be tolerated.
Podcasts
I don’t want to let virtue signaling totally off the hook here, because a lot of the time people hate it for good reason, like when it means sharing a sentiment while simultaneously acting in opposition. This is especially the case when the sentiment feels good but the action will cause some level of personal discomfort or sacrifice, which people do not like at all no siree.
I want to write more about that problem at some point, but a really good demonstration of it in action is the podcast Nice White Parents, which is about supposedly well-intentioned people who impede school integration and draw resources away from communities of color, all in the name of securing their own children’s education. It’s a frustrating podcast in that gee whiz This American Life isn’t racism fascinating way (many of the parents are not actually that nice!), but the story is brutally revealing about the progress people say they want, but will not act on due to self-interest or the perceived interests of their children.
Listening
Links
Effects of climate change—hotter temperatures, less dependable precipitation, snowpack that melts sooner—have led to faster-moving flames in California wildfires.
There have been dozens of cases of vehicular assault against protestors in recent weeks, and it has become the source of popular joke memes shared by right wing social media accounts and police officers.
In California, despite the surge of protest and demands, police reform efforts have stalled.
The largest single sloped solar array in the country is now on the roof of a former Pittsburgh steel mill.
The city plans to remove over 100 trees and endanger 500 total in one of the few leafy corridors in Roxbury, a Boston neighborhood where more than 90% of residents are people of color. People are pissed.
“It undermines the integrity of the research enterprise when individuals can pick and choose lines of inquiry that appeal to them simply because they can pay for them.”
Infinite Jest was the butt of a lot of Twitter jokes this week, and it reminded me of the time this woman was slowly eating the book for over a year.
A 4-year-old girl drifted a half a mile out to sea on a unicorn floatie. (ht Jamie)
This is “riot dog” Negro Matapacos, a stray in Santiago, Chile who in 2010 began joining student demonstrations fighting for free education and would famously would attack and bark at only riot police. He died three years ago this week. You can read his story and buy shirts and posters with him on it here.
Television
This week I’m going to recommend rewatching any show that you once really loved. It feels kind of like hanging out with an old friend. I’m currently rewatching Hannibal and The Sopranos season 4, which I just finished and it has some low points but the final episode when Tony and Carmela separate is some of the best acting in the history of television holy shit.
Silvio is not that good at interventions.
I endorse
Buying a $35 wi-fi extender so you can work in the backyard now that we are entering a brief window of tolerable weather.
You know one of the disorienting things about living in a society that certainly seems like it is mid-collapse is not just the badness, but the weirdness. Like today, to safely ensure our votes were counted in what is purportedly a democratic and wealthy nation, Jamie had to drive our ballots into downtown Boston and drop them into a box, the one box in the city where you can do this.
Also, we have coin-op washers in our building and, because there is a coin shortage—a shortage of the little things that mean money—we had to have our landlord unlock the washer and trade us quarters we had previously owned so we could wash our clothes.
The other day an online ad recommended that I buy a large supply of zip ties.
Another good one is I read this article in New York Magazine by a writer who is pregnant and had to drive for 13 hours, so she constructed her own portable roadside bathroom out of a little tent and a bucket she kept in her car, and all in all she was pretty stoked about it.
I showed it to Jamie and was like, “Jesus doesn’t this feel like something out Cormac McCarthy’s The Road? But it’s being presented in this cheery can-do tone like it’s out of…”
“HGTV?” she said.
“Exactly. It’s like we are living in The Road as told by HGTV.”
So I will leave you on that note this week. Welcome back to season two or volume two or something of this newsletter. Chatty one this week, shaking out the cobwebs. Let’s keep doing the thing.
From The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison. Also the header image from Crisis Palace #1.
Welp it has been just over a year since I started this newsletter that is nominally about climate change, but also about social movements, activism, philanthropy, and generally what it is like to be alive right now. As I write this, California is battling simultaneous catastrophes in the form of wildfires, record heat, blackouts, and a pandemic. I am worrying and sending love to my family members living in that part of the country during yet another frightening moment. So still no shortage of crisis, I guess.
What else. A historic uprising for racial justice. A climate movement that is more powerful than ever and resetting the national agenda. Changes rumbling in my parochial city. And I’ve gotten to know a lot more of the people on my block on a first name basis. It has been a year.
I’m going to keep this thing going, maybe try some different lengths (they seem to be growing), probably more interviews in the next year. But it feels like a good time to look back on some highlights from the past 46 issues for a minute. To get a sense of the project so far—scanning past issues, it seems I’ve called at least a few people pieces of shit, and you know what, I stand by it. Also newer readers can maybe check out some earlier stuff, and this could be a good one to share if you are so inclined.
I hope you will enjoy this stroll down memory lane and reminisce with me about all we’ve been through together. Or you can skip ahead to the links and stuff at the end.✓
You still get people who agree with this basic concept of climate justice but will say something like: Well, climate action is inherently an act of justice, because it stops vulnerable people from suffering. Put another way, we can’t get bogged down in issues of fairness when pursuing climate action because climate change creates such severe injustice that curbing it must be prioritized above all else.
What that argument gets seriously wrong, however, is that it casts people who are most vulnerable to climate impacts merely as passive victims of the problem. In other words, climate change is what happens to poor unfortunate people, and climate solutions are things we do for them and sometimes to them.
Even people arguing in favor of climate justice often fixate on outcomes in this way, that we have to be altruistic and consider people in need, etc.
I find climate justice as a solution to be a far more powerful argument—that we can’t get to the level of political power and sweeping change necessary without the most impacted communities playing a central and leading role. This is basically an organizing argument—that among other things, you need a powerful, engaged activist base and historically that’s the people who are feeling the pain of a problem right now.
In that sense, it’s not about “attaching” justice or fairness issues to climate action. Bold climate action requires engagement with justice and fairness issues. It’s about mobilizing human beings around the ways they are currently experiencing the problem.
Earlier this year, two miles west of my house, a woman named Marilyn Wentworth was crossing the street to get a coffee at her favorite shop, a little family-owned place I go to all the time. As she used the crosswalk to navigate the four lanes of traffic that rip through the neighborhood’s business district, a car struck and killed her. Her husband of 42 years reported seeing her body “fly in the air.”
That’s a particularly dangerous stretch of road, even for Boston, and the city is now pursuing a plan that would remove one car lane and add protected bike lanes. The Wentworth family and many others are advocating for it. But as you can imagine, there’s a lot of resistance. At a recent public meeting on the plan, one city council candidate charged the mic and said, “This is not a good idea.”
That there’s any resistance at all is a testament to the dedication with which someone will defend their right to strap themselves into a two-ton cocoon of plastic and steel to get anywhere they want to go, as fast as they want to go, with as few impediments as possible.
(update: all the city did was put up a couple of new signs)
As the scope of the pandemic was becoming clear, Shamar Bibbins, a senior program officer at climate funder the Kresge Foundation, was on a call with a public health nonprofit they fund in California, going over the kinds of questions that everyone working on climate change is having to face, like whether climate action should be taking a back seat to the immediate health threat.
The grantee made it clear that these are not issues that can be separated and dealt with in isolation. Remember, they told Bibbins, “Wildfire season is just around the corner.”
The thought of wildfire smoke coupled with a deadly respiratory illness is especially chilling, but feel free to swap it out with run-of-the-mill industrial pollution, any extreme weather event, flooding, or an urban heat wave to visualize how climate change is not some pet issue to be put back on the shelf, but a problem that compounds all other problems, and will hammer the same systems being tested by the virus.
“We like to say that climate change is a threat multiplier, that it affects everything. Climate change is a public health issue, it’s an economic issue, it’s a poverty issue, it’s a social justice issue,” Bibbins said. “As this pandemic just keeps unfolding, we’re seeing the weaknesses and vulnerabilities in our systems.”
In other words, things are breaking too easily, and in all the most predictable ways.
I see a lot of people, very serious climate people, rush to Bloomberg’s defense because of his philanthropic record. But his philanthropy shows us a lot about how Bloomberg wields power, which is that he uses all the channels available to him to try to fix the world in the ways that he sees best. So I see Bloomberg’s presidential campaign as another example of this hijack and redirect approach, attempting to fix a Democratic Party that is veering beyond his preferred solution set.
You might think well what’s the big deal he did help shut down those coal plants, after all. But hey maybe there was a way to transition away from coal without the US becoming the world’s largest producer of oil and gas in the process. And you know what, maybe he could beat Trump, but given what we know about his record, in service of what values, exactly? At the expense of whose suffering? And maybe the most important question, why is this the guy who gets to set these terms? And the answer is that he has $62 billion.
(update: everyone yelled at him and he dropped out)
One more quick David Koch is horrible story, but with this one has a happy ending. A cool trick they picked up in the 2010s was to swoop into communities considering public transit investments—things like tunnels, new bus routes, light rail expansions, real scary stuff—and pump money into the opposition, tanking once-popular proposals on the basis that taxes and public transit are attacks on liberty.
But (as we saw with you know who’s takeover of the party) there are limits to the Kochs’ influence. Their most recent transit battle was in my hometown of Phoenix, Arizona (OK I’m actually from Mesa). On Tuesday, a Koch-funded effort to ban any new light rail or streetcar construction in the city lost in a landslide. Good job Phoenix. The Koch legacy casts a long and ugly shadow, but it is not all powerful.
There may have been the suburban white anarchist dudes at the Climate Strike, but there were also hoodie-wearing black and brown teens pounding on drums spray painted with Extinction Rebellion and Sunrise logos. There were plenty of old people there like me but we all kind of had this look of like, holy shit, on our faces, at least I did. In other words, it felt weird and new in the best way.
One of my favorite little moments was this one older lady I was walking near toward the end and when people would chant like Fuck Charlie Baker or whatever, she would be like “no, no, no” scolding them. And one time some kids chanted something bad about cops and she said, hey those are people’s fathers and brothers and sisters. And this one teen said, “Yeah and they alllll suck.” Which I thought was pretty funny. Not the most strategic messaging I guess, and the teens were overall very chill, but the take home message being—that lady can no longer tell these young people the right thing to say. It’s not her show anymore.
Where I live in Roslindale, a diverse and still somewhat accessible neighborhood toward the southern end of Boston proper, there’s a 130-year-old house a couple doors down with a really nice big tree out front. We got a note in the mail that the owner intends to raze and rebuild the house, not a huge deal in the grand scheme, as the entire city of Boston feels more or less like one giant raze and rebuild project these days. But for the years we’ve lived here, we’ve watched as the owner let this house sit in various states of disrepair and inattention. Now the longtime tenants are being kicked out for a swift 100% displacement. The owner Jerry, who bought the house in 1990 for $161,000, will cash in on Boston’s surreal housing market, turning the property into three units that will probably sell for half a million each. This is a very common occurrence around here.
Last week I went to a meeting in a community center basement to hear about the project. There were a couple dozen people there and as always some had serious qualms about zoning variances, landscaping, quality of siding. A handful of us kept trying to steer the conversation toward affordability, but the perfectly nice people from the city reminded us that unless a building is 10 units or more, they can’t require affordable units, our hands are simply tied you understand. Just for fun, I asked Jerry if he would voluntarily consider making one of the three units affordable and he politely said no, I’m afraid that is not a thing that will be happening.
(no progress, house sitting vacant and overrun with weeds thanks Jerry)
It may feel like I’m drifting far in this train of thought that started with green building, to consider how it relates to institutions like incarceration. But as we are figuring out what our world looks like next, in the midst of climate crisis, I think the same sense of imagination needs to be applied to the things we build and to the systems that allow what gets built and for whom.
In both cases, we are talking about structures we create that shape how we want to live and how we want to treat each other and our surroundings, either set free or constrained by our imaginations.
These days I try my best for what Jay Rosen calls “here’s where I’m coming from” journalism, where you stick to the facts and strive to be fair, but still acknowledge that you have a certain point of view.
We all bring our own ideologies to the table. And while some things should not be equivocated or compromised, a sense of certainty can also be folly. Climate change and similar complex global problems and their solutions are rife with blind spots and contradictions.
So how do we deal with this conflict between holding to our convictions and acknowledging complexity and unknowns? Increasingly, the voices out there that I admire are dealing with this tension, not by clinging to the false balance of always presenting both sides, but by acknowledging both their own perspectives and their uncertainties—maybe a more honest kind of balance.
Sriram Madhusoodanan, Corporate Accountability: “You know, you walk through these halls [of COP25] and you just wonder, are the people here seeing the same things that we’re seeing out in the streets and in the real world, because it does feel like the pace of progress is so slow and so glacial and it is not meeting the ambition of what people are demanding.”
If climate anxiety went somewhat mainstream this year, that has a similarly time-warping effect, in that we normally gauge time on human scales and pretend geological scales don’t exist because they are so much bigger than us so as to be imperceptible. But engaging with climate change plunges the personal passage of time into the planetary passage of time, which can be a disorienting and not super fun experience.
Coronavirus and climate change are similar in that everything seems fine until it’s clearly not fine anymore but by that time it’s mostly too late because what really mattered was all the stuff we should have been doing when everything seemed fine but we didn’t.
So in both cases, when you take precautions in advance you might feel silly and some people might even make fun of you, but then later if you didn’t act in advance, you will feel like you really screwed up like James Franco in that movie where he squished his arm in the rock and was like ah shit I can’t believe I left that bottle of gatorade in the truck now I have to drink my pee.
This is a terrifying feeling, but it is also revealing of what exactly it is we are all doing here. What we’ve been valuing all this time and what we subject ourselves to, often needlessly, in service of a system that is, at least for now, loaded with holes. As Anne Applebaum puts it, “Epidemics have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact.”
For one, they unveil with stark clarity the worst humans among us, that some portion of the people who are always holding back our quality of life, our collective liberation, our basic survival, are quite simply, forgive me, just pieces of shit.
It feels crass to talk about having a hard time as a white, middle-class man who could have it way worse, and who benefits from the systems that are making it so much harder on other people. But I know that in my own activism and writing about social justice, I feel a tendency to want to be this stoic, stiff-upper-lipped ally, when what’s really needed is full engagement, intellectual and emotional. In mainstream climate change discourse, in particular, the dominance of white male voices, often scientists trying to stick to their data, has cultivated a sterile, emotionless tone that many feel has held back the cause.
So there’s one crowd that says climate change is just another thing we have to figure out and it will be hard but we’ll innovate our way out of it and continue our general upward trajectory of better technology and economic growth. Another crowd says, actually, climate change is indicative of a sick relationship we have with the planet and its resources—overconsumption, consolidation of wealth, corporate globalization, industrial agriculture, loss of biodiversity.
If you’ve read any of my other emails or just the way I wrote that last sentence, you will rightly suspect that I lean toward the latter story, but like all of these stark divides on climate, I think there’s some truth in both. The idea that we should somehow dial back technology and standard of living and return to some kind of agrarian society seems both impossible and undesirable (Bill McKibben is a climate hero, but he lives in rural Vermont and that says a lot if you know anything about rural Vermont, and I once heard him say in an interview that in some ways maybe life wasn’t so bad in the Middle Ages it’s like come on Bill McKibben).
But coronavirus—and the urbanization, deforestation, and trade of wildlife that spark pandemics like it—casts a firm vote for the idea that our relationship with our surroundings is broken.
The Iranian Revolution itself was overwhelmingly nonviolent in its tactics and involved pretty much every segment of society, succeeding in toppling a repressive monarchy where previous violent uprisings had failed. Participants included student activists, workers, professionals, merchants, academics, you name it. There were mass protests in the streets, but there were also nightly poetry readings.
In contrast, there was an armed guerrilla movement happening at the same time, but the authors point out that it was unable to to gain significant participation. In part because it was violent, but also because of its rigid Marxist litmus test that the coalition-based movement did not have.
One of the most interesting things about this diversity of participation is that, while you might expect that kind of big tent approach would lead to compromise or capitulation, in some ways it did the opposite. Toward the end of the revolution, the Shah offered steps toward liberal reform that opposition would have jumped at in earlier days. But by that time, there was only one acceptable outcome—regime change. In other words, when people show up, you don’t have to compromise.
The abolitionist goal is creating something different, with the understanding that violent paramilitary forces with racist DNA and no accountability, responding to a city’s every social problem, will never be an acceptable situation. We need something new, so we take funding away from one thing, and give it to other things that do a better job of solving the problems we currently entrust with men carrying tools that cause death and pain.
Arroyo pointed out that cop overtime budget alone, even with the Mayor’s proposed cut, would still be 165% bigger than the community center budget, over 1,000% bigger than the budget to aid seniors, 9,400% bigger than the budget for people with disabilities, 15,000% bigger than the fair housing and equity budget. Hell, the police overtime budget is half the size of the city’s entire public works budget.
Have I made it clear via my aggressive use of command-i that we are still just talking about overtime pay? Where does this $60 million in annual overtime go, you might ask? Well, sometimes it goes to fraud. To the fraud line item. Shockingly large chunks of it go to individual police. In 2016, a 34-year-old cop was the highest paid person at the City of Boston, taking home more than $400,000. Last year, the second-highest-paid city employee was this piece of shit, who has been the subject of 20 internal investigations, six that are currently pending.
“Does this budget reflect my love for my communities? Does it go far enough in providing a much needed hand up to those who are most devastated by this pandemic and centuries of systemic racism?” Arroyo posed to the council. “Is this operations budget just? Is it equitable? The answer for me is no, and so is my vote.”
Imagine if you will, a group of highly paid newspaper columnists and tenured professors sounding the alarm that “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” all during a period of surging, historic political engagement. That speaks volumes about what this cohort thinks it means to protect public discourse.
This hysteria over imagined mobs of intolerant leftists is a response to the same underlying shift that has people wringing their hands over statues and storefronts during outcries for social justice. It’s the same underlying conditions that cause a couple in khakis to point their guns at peaceful demonstrators marching past their mansion.
People lacking voice, safety, high paying jobs, health care, and housing are rising up and demanding better. And a subset of people who have those things and more are freaking. The fuck. Out.
“We don’t really have a good word for a just and equitable society. The way that I usually hear the conversation around utopia, and it kind of bugs me, is we use utopia as a stand in, both for our ideas of what a perfect society might look like, and what a just and equitable society might look like. And the conflation means that you can use the perfect society definition to gaslight the justice and equity one.
You can say, ‘perfection is impossible’ to a question about housing, about education. It’s a way that we normalize the present and we pretend like the things that are happening—the injustices that we see in our current world—aren’t the result of choices we’re actually making.
Someone will say, we should make our society work for everyone, and someone else will say, what you’re describing is utopia and utopia is impossible. This is good enough. We should improve upon this thing. When, in reality, this thing is really bad. And we should question the whole assumption of this thing.”
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Links
The DNC stripped from its policy platform language calling on an end to fossil fuel tax breaks and subsidies, and climate activists are extremely pissed. Nancy Pelosi also endorsed Joe Kennedy what a stupid ass party.
The Globe has been running attack after attack on the Mass Bail Fund, but a criminal justice professor points out that the fund is on the right side of justice, as its actions reduce trauma and statistically reduce future violent acts.
Climate progress is being wiped out by surging methane. The latest rollback means oil and gas companies are no longer required to detect and repair leaks.
Death Valley hit 130 degrees, which could be the highest temperature ever recorded on Earth. “It’s like stepping into a convection oven.”
In Bend, Oregon, the last surviving Blockbuster listed itself on Airbnb, inviting three small groups to each spend one night in the store next month. They set up a couch and a TV and VCR.
“Pull down your mask, liberate your consciousness: It’s time to meet Facts Man.”
I’ve always loved this song and listened to the album on vacation and it got me wanting to read Wuthering Heights but I’m afraid I wouldn’t like it as much as the song. This video is amazing.
I missed you all while we were on semi-vacation the past couple weeks. Jamie and I went out to stay at a cabin in Western Massachusetts for a while where we cooked on a grill every night, made fires in a firepit, and most nights got to look up at a sky full of stars, all of which was very nice. Eating various local cheeses, pointing out the window at rolling hills and 300 year old farmhouses.
Being in the country during a pandemic was still a little weird though, in some ways more apocalyptic than in the city. Always driving for miles to three locations before finding one that is open, social media updates and “Welcome!” signs betrayed by dark interiors and empty shelves. Some spooky moments including in a Starbucks in Chicopee.
I would still recommend it if you can safely pull it off, if only for a few days to break things up. We’re thinking of lining up another little jaunt for the fall. Before what is sure to be a long and dark winter sets in.
Tate
PS. What do you want to read in Crisis Palace next year? Favorite sections? Topics? Least favorite? Too long? Too short? Reply and let me know I would sincerely love to hear from you.
A conversation with Cadwell Turnbull, author of The Lesson, about science fiction, colonialism, and redefining utopia
Elements of conchology, or, An introduction to the knowledge of shells. 1776.
The Lesson, the debut novel by Cadwell Turnbull, is one of best sci-fi novels I’ve read in years. It’s nominally an alien invasion story, but of a very different sort. For one, it takes place five years after the alien invasion, and it’s deeply character driven, opting to focus on how ordinary people’s lives are changed by the presence of powerful aliens, the Ynaa, who seem benign most of the time, but occasionally commit acts of brutal violence. The book is also a cutting exploration of colonialism, set in the past and present day U.S. Virgin Islands, where the author grew up. The Lesson received rave reviews and well-earned comparisons to the work of Octavia E. Butler and Ursula K. Le Guin.
Turnbull also recently wrote this insightful essay for Wired, “Dystopia Isn’t Sci-Fi—for Me, It’s the American Reality,” which I talked about in last week’s issue. That essay is what prompted me to reach out to him, as it explores a lot of themes of this newsletter, but I was also eager to talk about his fiction and his activism. He’s involved in Grassroots Economic Organizing, a collective that promotes worker co-ops and the solidarity economy—an economic model based on democratic participation, cooperation, and community ownership.
Be sure to check out The Lesson, available in all formats, and Turnbull’s other fiction. He’s contributed stories to The Dystopia Triptych, a series of just-released dystopian fiction anthologies, and Entanglements, an upcoming anthology from MIT Press edited by Sheila Williams. We spoke as he was preparing to relocate for a new job teaching at North Carolina State University, in the same program where he got his MFA. And the forthcoming first book in his new fantasy trilogy is titled No Gods No Monsters. OK here’s the interview.
One thing that I really loved about The Lesson is how vividly character driven it was. It’s a very intense book, but there’s also this kind of everyday drama about it that feels very real to me. There’s this huge precariousness going on in the background, but then day-to-day life just kind of like marches on. And I wonder to what extent life feels that way to you.
In some ways, I wrote the book to have a conversation about colonialism and power dynamics, when someone is vastly more powerful than a particular group in a particular place, and they kind of lord over them up close and from afar, and that kind of relationship dynamic and what that does. And so now, even looking at all the stuff that’s happening in America and across the world, there’s that weird mix of normal life, and all of these politics that kind of feel distant, but they reach into your life.
And I would say that it’s very similar, thinking about the Virgin Islands. Day to day, the Virgin Islands feels like it’s all about these three islands and the people on them. But there’s all these ways that being a part of the United States kind of tangentially plays into the culture and affects how we think about ourselves in relation to our place—how we think about people coming in, tourists, how we think about our various family members abroad. It’s this way that we’re always, even though it’s very distant, relating ourselves to the mainland, to stateside.
And sometimes it’s not that obvious, but our economy’s very tourist heavy. So the cruise ships come in every week and people come off the cruise ships and they’re all walking down Main Street and they’re shopping and they’re interacting with the commerce of the place, but not necessarily the people of the place. There’s this interesting wall between those things, between normal life as a St. Thomian, and the tourist culture, people who are relating to us from a strictly commercial sense.
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of China Mieville’s The City & the City. Where there’s two cities that are superimposed on each other but they don’t interact. They’re existing in the same space, but there’s a disconnect.
Right. So like with the Ynaa, they interact with the island, kind of. Sometimes a member of the Ynaa will be walking down the street or they’ll be eating some food. They’re definitely a part of the island and the islanders know they’re a part of it. And even though you could see the spaceship on the waterfront, the regular day-to-day stuff still feels the same, despite the fact that every once in a while you might pass an alien.
Right, right. Life just sort of goes on even though there’s this tremendous threat that you could stumble across at any given time. I know you’re a big Buffy fan, and I’m a big Buffy fan as well, and your work kind of reminds me of Buffy in the way it uses supernatural elements to bring out intensities of real life. It feels very real, even though there’s this fantastical element. How much of that is intentional on your part? And what do you feel sci-fi and fantasy elements bring to your fiction?
I mean, in terms of Buffy, you know, I grew up watching that show. And it was always interesting to see these high schoolers fighting the forces of evil on the side, and occasionally a vampire showing up in the halls. But then on the regular day to day, the teachers didn’t seem to be aware of it, like students would be absent because they were murdered off screen, right? And no one seemed to be like, hey where’s Andy, he didn’t show up to class today. I just always thought that was really fun and there seemed to be a playfulness to it. You know, at one point, the school actually just blows up. And Sunnydale proper just goes on as usual. And it seems like Sunnydale exists in some kind of weird snow globe where everyone else is like, yeah, that just happens there. But everywhere else, you know, we’re normal over here.
And so yeah, engaging with that kind of media and enjoying it must have played a role in the way that I think about my fiction. I don’t know if it was particularly conscious. I just know that when I was writing The Lesson, I didn’t want to prioritize the aliens too much. I didn’t want it to feel like it was about them. The human characters are relating to the Ynaa in different ways, but it’s all very rooted in their own experience. And their relationship to other people, their relationship to the place, their questions about faith and sexuality, all these big things. For the people in the story, it seemed important to me that they relate to the Ynaa through themselves, not on the Ynaa’s terms.
It’s kind of like they’re trying to not let the Ynaa’s presence define who they are, but it’s always this presence there in their lives.
Right. And I would say, it’s similar to the Virgin Islands’ relationship to the US. It is a presence. We are the US Virgin Islands, but when we talk about stateside, we say “stateside.” We tend to separate ourselves, at least in a linguistic way, when we talk about the country we belong to. It’s the country we belong to, but it’s not us all the time. It’s kind of fluid.
You know, you mentioned you wanted to write a story about colonialism. And there’s this common colonialism trope in especially classic science fiction. It’s like terraforming other planets and setting up these outposts and conquering these distant monsters. I wonder how much of that bothered you being a science fiction fan, when you were growing up, or now. And how much, as you were writing your own alien story, you wanted to subvert those tropes in your work.
Yes, it bothered me. A lot of the time, I would engage with science fiction the way anybody would. I wasn’t always being critical of it. One of my favorite shows was Stargate growing up, and I would watch Stargate and I didn’t think about the militaristic aspect. It was fun. It was like, yeah, they were wearing military uniforms, but they were exploring other planets. And they had advisory roles on different planets, or they would mitigate some kind of disaster happening somewhere or some conflict between two nations on some planet. And I thought that was really interesting and fun.
I did not think about the fact that it was America doing that and how it fit into ideas about American imperialism, how how even on a galactic scale, America was centering itself and its concerns, and the story was bending over backwards to present this American worldview as being just and good. And, you know, we’re saving the galaxy now, not just the world.
But there would be times when I was watching the show, and the team would be interacting with some locals or they would be mitigating some conflict, and I would find myself on the other side, defending the worldview of the people there or being like, you’re not giving enough time to what they’re feeling about your invasion, right? And I feel like at least it was stewing somewhere in my subconscious when I was young.
I think that that’s truer to what would actually happen, that not everybody’s relationship with the aliens would be equal on Earth. We’re not just one human race. There are complicated power dynamics among us and those things would play out even in the midst of an alien presence.
As I got older, and I read more speculative fiction, I got more critical of the kinds of things I saw. I was like, why are the aliens always showing up to New York? Or DC? And why would they think those places are important? Why would it be important to them? When we explore other planets, why do we assume our supremacy in those contexts? Why don’t we think that it’s problematic to land on a planet without talking to the inhabitants first, and that kind of thing. But it took me a while to get there.
I feel like The Lesson, through writing it, I was also engaging with my critique of science fiction that I saw before and trying to do something different. And I didn’t always know what I was critiquing or what was bothering me when I started.
One of the things that I refer to in the book is how the rest of the world treats the Virgin Islands, while the Virgin Islands is bearing the brunt of the Ynaa’s existence. They’re there, and they’re causing legitimate harm to the community, but the rest of the world is benefiting from Ynaa technology. And there’s a kind of saltiness the Virgin Islanders have in relation to the rest of the world because of that. I think that that’s truer to what would actually happen, that not everybody’s relationship with the aliens would be equal on Earth. We’re not just one human race. There are complicated power dynamics among us and those things would play out even in the midst of an alien presence.
Well, in a way, you’re talking about the presence of politics in your writing. I heard you say in another interview that a lot of times writers want to focus only on the personal. But that you can’t separate the political from the personal because your politics are how you relate to the world. Can you elaborate on that?
I’ll use healthcare for an example. I grew up in a cultural context where we were really hesitant to go to the doctor. There was a lot of anxiety attached to it. And I know that a lot of people have anxiety attached to going to the doctor. But within a community that is poor and doesn’t have adequate health care and knows that going to the doctor is going to affect their ability to pay rent next week or feed their kids, there’s a lot of extra anxiety about doing those kind of things. And so, those things are likely to be put off, and sometimes with disastrous consequences. I’ve had family members die because they didn’t go to the hospital. Something was wrong with them, and they just didn’t know because they never went.
There’s a reason why some people’s homes feel more secure. And a lot of that has to do with systems. It has to do with how much pressure is on an individual, how much pressure is on a family, and those things have to do with larger political systems, not just what’s happening in that one place.
So to me, you could write that story as a personal story about someone with a phobia of going to the hospital, and treat it as if it’s just an individual thing. Or you could talk about the fact that most people don’t have adequate health care, it’s really expensive, it destabilizes people’s households when someone gets sick. And so there’s a lot of anxiety and fear attached to wellness, or seeking help, for physical health or mental health. And that is political. That is politics. That is policy.
You know, growing up, part of my family was on food stamps assistance and some of my aunts and cousins lived in public housing. Those things are attached to politics. There’s a reason why some people are able to buy homes and create generational wealth, and some people can’t. There’s a reason why some people can afford to buy food on a regular basis, and some people have to struggle to buy food. That affects their health and that affects their levels of stress. There’s a reason why some people’s homes feel more secure. And a lot of that has to do with systems. It has to do with how much pressure is on an individual, how much pressure is on a family, and those things have to do with larger political systems, not just what’s happening in that one place.
It’s definitely a privilege to be able to not engage with politics. And not everybody has that ability to sort of separate it off as something that you might watch on TV or something on the news.
Right, it’s happening to them.
Well, I guess that leads well into your essay for Wired, about dystopia and utopia. And I wanted to ask you about a couple things in that piece. So one topic that I thought was really powerful was the way you define utopia as being a move toward justice and equity, and not necessarily a perfect world. I wonder if you could kind of elaborate on, in your mind, what the difference is between justice and perfection.
We don’t really have a good word for a just and equitable society. The way that I usually hear the conversation around utopia, and it kind of bugs me, is we use utopia as a stand in, both for our ideas of what a perfect society might look like, and what a just and equitable society might look like. And the conflation means that you can use the perfect society definition to gaslight the justice and equity one.
You can say, “perfection is impossible” to a question about housing, about education. It’s a way that we normalize the present and we pretend like the things that are happening—the injustices that we see in our current world—aren’t the result of choices we’re actually making. We can say, “Well, this is just the world. The world is not fair. The world is imperfect.” When what we’re really talking about is that our systems are really bad. And that’s a different conversation. But we don’t treat them as different conversations.
Someone will say, we should make our society work for everyone, and someone else will say, what you’re describing is utopia and utopia is impossible. This is good enough. We should improve upon this thing. When, in reality, this thing is really bad. And we should question the whole assumption of this thing.
I always think of how part of the American perspective is that some people deserve to thrive and some people don’t, and it’s not our jobs to say who does and who doesn’t, we’ll just sort of let it work itself out. And, you know, it’s just natural that some people are going to suffer. I wonder if that’s something that you think can change in the American perspective. It feels like such a big part of what the country is, I don’t know.
I don’t know, either. I mean, part of the reason why I was writing that essay was that I was grappling internally with a lot of things that I was feeling and that was the first time articulating what I felt was a huge problem. There’s just a way that we operate that assumes a lot of things, and those assumptions, I think, are really bad and they perpetuate injustice.
There’s a way that we just take for granted the suffering of marginalized groups of people. And that to get to a better society, those same people have to suffer more. Like arguing and arguing, being attacked, being discriminated against, in order to get people to recognize just their basic humanity. I feel like if we were to change the framing, at least in our conversations, we might get a step towards changing culture a little bit.
A meritocracy might determine whether you get a certain job or a certain paycheck, or whatever. I’m fine with that, but I just feel like people should be able to eat. That should not be an argument about merit. You know, no one should have to prove that they are deserving of eating.
The idea that some people should suffer is something we should challenge. And even if it’s true that some people might end up suffering anyway, because suffering is a part of life, we should question it in terms of the operations of our systems. We should say, at the very least, everyone should be comfortable. And that should be something that we try to make true. And believe that it can exist. You know, health concerns are unavoidable, natural disasters are unavoidable, those kinds of things. But the system shouldn’t be harming people, or killing people. And the system itself shouldn’t be standing idly by as people suffer and die. That, to me, seems basic.
Part of this is a conversation around meritocracy. There should be a basic assumption of humanity and that should not be in question. A meritocracy might determine whether you get a certain job or a certain paycheck, or whatever. I’m fine with that, but I just feel like people should be able to eat. That should not be an argument about merit. You know, no one should have to prove that they are deserving of eating.
Yeah, I mean, there’s a talking point among conservatives that not everybody deserves health care. That not everybody deserves to live and be healthy, which is such a strange sort of way to think about the world.
Yeah, like why? If you take a step back, it sounds absurd. If you were to remove all of the history of where that political opinion comes from and the way that we’ve normalized it. If you step back and just look at it, it seems ridiculous. It’s like, no, everybody should have health care. Everybody should be able to eat, everybody should have shelter, all of the things that we know that people need to live and survive, everyone should have. There are real consequences when we don’t think about what is inalienable for a human being, what a human being should just have.
Yeah, well, it reminds me of that line in your essay, which is, there is an assumption that injustice is normal, and that oppression is realistic. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about failure of imagination as a problem of injustice, and how we might get people to change what they believe is possible, or if that can be done.
On the second part of that question, I think that art is one way. I think about the reason I got into science fiction and genre, because I wanted to imagine alternatives to being and treat them as if those could be normal. So one of my favorite books is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. That story takes for granted that it’s possible to have a political system based on everyone having what everybody else else has. And that there’s some level of self governance that can be assumed, and that humanity wouldn’t implode because of it. Life on Anarres is really hard, but everyone is relatively fine, and sharing resources isn’t going to lead to the breakdown of society. That, to me, is really powerful. And you can’t get there without creating a story around something like that, as if it’s real.
You can’t take reality for granted. The way that we’ve set things up was made by either deliberate or unconscious decisions, and the way that we change that is by deliberate or unconscious decisions.
But I think that in terms of activism, asking a question or critiquing a thing helps to challenge the assumption of its rightness and true-ness and centered-ness. If I ask a question like, why prison? Someone has to respond with, well, these are the reasons why we must have prisons, and then you can then have a conversation about each one of those things. Well, does our prison system do that? No, not really. Is it rehabilitating? No. Should we punish people in that way? Do you think that’s a good way to punish people? Maybe not.
It’s a way of renegotiating what we should consider normal. And to me that only works with engagement or asking the questions of why. You can’t take reality for granted. The way that we’ve set things up was made by either deliberate or unconscious decisions, and the way that we change that is by deliberate or unconscious decisions.
Do you see your writing as part of your activism or your politics? Do you find them to be kind of the same thing? Or are they sort of different projects for you?
I think they’re different projects. Ursula Le Guin talked about this, where she felt like her dedication was to her work. Her writing, that was her activism. And James Baldwin talks about this too, how he would try to join different organizations and then he would want to question them. And there’s a way that even progressive or radical organizations assume certain things to be true and they don’t challenge themselves on those assumptions.
With art, you can critique anything on a foundational level. Even the thing that you are presenting as a remedy. It teaches an underlying way of questioning, even when you think you’re right, that I think is important and valuable to activism. It’s important and valuable to social change.
I feel like, for my own brain, I really like fiction, because you can create a premise and you can also challenge a premise within it, and you need to. Inherent within fiction, you need to talk about conflict, or else it’s not interesting, it’s not a story. So reading The Dispossessed, that society is, I would say, much better than ours in terms of its ethics. But there are conflicts and problems within it. And those conflicts need to be resolved by the characters within the story.
There’s a way that—and I don’t want to say it like this—but there’s a way when you are organizing with other people, you kind of have to drink the Kool Aid. You kind of have to like, critique it, but not critique it on a foundational level. Where I think that with art, you can critique anything on a foundational level. Even the thing that you are presenting as a remedy. It teaches an underlying way of questioning, even when you think you’re right, that I think is important and valuable to activism. It’s important and valuable to social change. And I just find stories where that is happening more compelling because I feel like the work is never done and your story should treat it that way, and you shouldn’t assume that you’ve arrived at the answer. It’s a step.
I wanted to ask you about your work with Grassroots Economic Organizing. I wonder if you could tell me about how you got involved with that group and what speaks to you about their work?
It came out of fiction. I’ll tell you exactly what I was thinking about. I was thinking about having family that grew up in public housing, having grown up part of my life in public housing. I was thinking about how tight knit those communities are. You can really like walk next door and ask for sugar. It’s not a cliche, it’s a thing that you can do. One time, someone in our neighborhood bought bikes for a bunch of the kids on our street. Now, as an adult, I’m like, where did he get the money to buy those bikes? But at the time, it was really sweet and no one seemed to think it was odd. Everyone just got a bike and they were excited.
There was just that kind of relationship where you just knew everyone. You would go outside, and you’d walk down the sidewalk and pass the same people you pass every day, and they would ask you about your aunt and ask you about your cousin, ask about your mom or your grandmother. You’d be like, she’s fine, how’s so and so.
I was trying to imagine a speculative story where that same kind of culture was used to the economic benefit of the entire block or the entire community. They would create a business together, or cook food and deliver it to other people. Or they would buy cars together, they would create some kind of structure where they could buy a car and you could all use the car to do deliveries or whatever. All of these very working-class jobs, but they would pool that money into making the community stronger, investing in other things and other projects and other businesses. And that over time, they could create stability as a group.
I was like, what would that look like? And then I looked online, thinking, there must be something like this. And I found co-ops. I didn’t know what a co-op was, and growing up, I couldn’t point to one. We didn’t really have things set up that way. I feel like talking to people in the states, they at least know what a co-op grocery store is. But I had no conception of that. So I saw that, and over time, I got really interested in co-ops and started reading a lot more about them.
Through that work, which was at that time, research for a project that just never happened, I got submerged in the community. And then I met someone that was a part of a co-op, and they recommended Grassroots Economic Organizing to me. I thought what they were doing was really interesting. And then I joined.
But it came out of me trying to write a short story or something with this imagined cooperative structure. It turns out that it actually exists in the world. And there’s a lot of different kinds of co-ops—housing co-ops, worker co-ops, co-op associations, open value networks, all of these interesting, cooperative setups. And most people don’t really know about them. I was like, this is something that I could do, I could figure out a way to work with GEO to make these things better known or write about them, to engage with them in fiction.
I can see why that would be so appealing. I like the way co-ops chop up different parts of the existing economy and sort of piece together something totally new out of it, does that make sense?
Yeah, yeah, it does. Right now I’ve been working on a co-op game, like me and a few co-op people. We imagine a fictional co-op, and we’ve created characters within it, and we play them and they interact and they have conflict and there’s this larger world conflict that’s happening. It’s very cool.
Like a role playing game?
Like a role playing game. We Zoom. Well, we don’t Zoom, there’s this co-op version of Zoom. But we have these chats on Sundays, they last an hour and a half, two hours. And we have these shared characters and this shared co-op, and a shared world. We’ve been doing that for a number of weeks. And it’s getting quite elaborate now.
Do you find that is a way to explore the possibilities of different concepts that could be put into place in co-ops, or is it just for fun?
It’s both. A lot of us are just having fun with it. It’s an opportunity for us to play on a new co-op model, and play out what the model would entail, but it’s also really fun.
That’s so cool. Okay, well, I want to get toward wrapping up here. I appreciate you taking the time to talk. I really enjoyed this, and I wish you the best in your writing and all these big life changes coming up.
Thank you. This was really great. I really enjoyed our conversation.
OK there’s the interview. And remember, the unabridged version is here, including lots of other great details about Cadwell’s writing process and more.✓
Podcasts
Back to the poetry corner this week, via Tracy K. Smith’s The Slowdown.
“they say plastic is the perfect creation because it never dies…”
Watching
I am currently watching season 2 of The Strain. I was going to stop but now I’ve watched almost the whole season so I guess it’s got something going for it. It’s pretty gross, lots of worms crawling into eyeballs etc.
Jamie and I also watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire. While we were watching it, we were both honestly finding it a little slow to get going, real slow burn, slow and low. But it is an extremely beautiful movie and one that I was thinking about a lot after it was over, which I always think is one measure of a good movie.
Listening
I can do two in one newsletter it’s my newsletter. This video. 😮
Well next week we are going to try that age old coping strategy of running away from our problems. Specifically, driving to Western Massachusetts to stay in a cabin for 10 days, as we are doing next week because we must leave this house. That means, I’m sorry to inform you, that I’ll be skipping a week, maybe two weeks depending on how things go. Maybe I’ll send a best of or something.
Either way, you know I love you all as though you were my children that I do nothing to care for. So take care of yourselves. Take a deep breath. Maybe put a cold washcloth on your forehead for a couple of minutes. I’ll be back before you know it.
Technocrats are no longer setting the agenda and activists are taking over
Fauna ibérica; mamíferos Madrid, Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, 1914.
So I want to talk about Joe Biden’s climate plan, whoa whoa hang on come back. Mainly I want to talk about the process by which his climate plan came about, which suggests that technocrats are no longer setting all of our policy agendas, and activists are increasingly taking over. And that is something I think we should be happy about, especially on climate change.
I will say first that of course I am going to vote for Joe Biden, whose middle name is Robinette, and I really do hope he wins but I’m not some Joe Biden fan or anything. He sucks in a lot of ways and I was not excited when it became clear he would be the nominee but that’s elections you know.
Still, like a lot of people when I first saw his new climate plan, which surfaced last week out of the regular torrent of sickness and violence that is the daily news cycle, I was surprisingly happy about it. I can’t even remember who all the other candidates were at this point, but during the primary, Biden had one of the worst climate platforms out of the frontrunners (Sunrise Movement gave him an F). His new plan has faster timelines, more government spending, more ambitious goals in specific sectors, and notably, a big focus on racial and environmental justice.
Biden’s team lifted components from several places, including Jay Inslee’s platform, and as Julian Brave NoiseCat of Data for Progress points out, the leading presidential candidate has basically adopted the gist of the Green New Deal (albeit with some of its leftiest ideas picked out). “Biden’s plans broadly align with an approach advocated by the left-wing of the Democratic party,” NoiseCat wrote.
In short, it is a huge victory for the Sanders/Warren wing of the party, Jay Inslee, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey, but mostly the legion of young activists who reshaped the climate debate and forced this issue to the top of politicians’ agendas before and during the primary. And don’t say oh all that will never pass the Senate, it doesn’t diminish the fact that this is the new benchmark, set by a moderate candidate.
But to really appreciate what this shift means, I think you have to look at how the plan came about, especially in contrast to the last big push for federal climate action— USCAP and the Waxman-Markey cap and trade bill.
This now-historic failed attempt at national climate legislation could not have been more different in its origins from the Green New Deal, or Biden’s new climate agenda. That’s because the cap and trade strategy was more or less engineered in various board rooms over the years by technocrats—a combination of large NGOs, foundations, lawmakers, and industry representatives. A partnership called USCAP in particular set out to pursue the most industry-friendly, market-driven compromise they could, which ultimately led to the cap and trade bill that died in the Senate in 2010.
Wealthy donors and foundations played a big role in shaping this strategy, after they pooled resources in the late 2000s on an agenda-setting report called “Design to Win” and a resulting NGO called the ClimateWorks Foundation. While neither project focused solely on cap and trade, and CW has supported a lot of other work over the years, the initiatives championed the idea of a national carbon market, with Design to Win predicting that it would “prompt a sea change that washes over the entire global economy.” Foundations, donors and NGOs threw significant weight behind a cap and trade policy, and more broadly, set the table for the engineering- and economics-heavy framing of climate change that dominated for decades.
While there are many theories as to why Waxman-Markey fizzled out exactly, I tend to agree with the analysis that rushing to the center as a starting point meant voluntarily capitulating to an unpopular compromise bill that nobody really liked that much. It banked too much on the importance of lukewarm industry and GOP support and not enough on public will (other incarnations of this same approach have limped along sadly ever since). Related, it was an elite-driven campaign that had little connection to the grassroots or actual people. As organizer and academic Marshall Ganz put it, the big green groups behind it had become “bodiless heads,” to their own detriment.
I’ve harped on this story a lot in various venues, mainly because I think it is a powerful example of what the climate movement did wrong for many years. And it’s an example of how the wealthy and powerful, even if they have good intentions, can impose their own agendas on social movements and hold back progress.
The process that led to Biden’s new plan was strikingly different. It involved a task force that brought together representatives selected by the Biden and Sanders campaigns, including Ocasio-Cortez, Sunrise Movement co-founder Varshini Prakash, and Catherine Flowers, the founder of the Center for Rural Enterprise and Environmental Justice. Quite a different roster from USCAP, which included the EDF and NRDC, along with BP, Duke Energy, PG&E, and ConocoPhillips. Long before the task force, the Green New Deal itself was a largely iterative process, with grassroots groups and networks pushing to strengthen its justice lens since it was introduced.
Of course, I have no idea how the Biden campaign or his new climate agenda will end. But what the campaign seems to be banking on (and NoiseCat notes the polling backs this up) is that climate change could be a winning issue with the left and the center. And maybe the only reason it wasn’t before is that it was always framed as this sterile math problem. In reality it’s a labor issue, a health issue, a justice issue, an agriculture issue, and a matter of overall human well-being and dignity that impacts every single one of us.
Even if not much happens with this exact plan, which is you know likely, the process by which the plan came into existence says something kind of remarkable about how much activist pressure has shifted the way we approach climate change, now as a human problem. I suspect that change will bear fruit well beyond a presidential candidate’s campaign.
You never really know what the outcomes of social movements will be, but this strikes me as one of those surprising outcomes. All those people who marched, who knocked on doors for Bernie Sanders, who got arrested sitting in Congressional offices, they changed the rules of the game and that’s pretty cool.
Cadwell Turnbull on American Dystopia
I would normally put this in the Links section, but I just loved this essay by Cadwell Turnbull so much that I wanted to more prominently note it. I very much enjoyed Turnbull’s The Lesson, which is an weighty alien invasion story set in the US Virgin Islands. He explores similar themes as in that novel in this essay for Wired, “Dystopia Isn’t Sci-Fi—for Me, It’s the American Reality,” including the ways that dark fictional tropes are not imaginary for marginalized communities.
He also talks about how, to overcome the dystopias in our midst, we need to believe that utopia can exist, and that a better world is possible. Not utopia in the sense of a perfect world. Rather he points to that anarchist society in Ursula LeGuin’s excellent book The Dispossessed, that is imperfect, but rooted in an idealistic pursuit of cooperation and solidarity—a fundamental assumption that justice is real and possible. Here’s my favorite part, but go and read the whole thing:
But in America, especially in discussions about social justice, “just” and “perfect” are treated as synonymous objectives. And because perfect is never attainable, justice, too, becomes out of reach. Under this framing, injustice becomes normal, oppression is realistic, and any move towards justice and equity must come from struggle. A disturbing unspoken belief is born from this framing, that marginalized people will never receive full humanity because a just society is not possible. By failing to recognize the dystopia, and dismissing the possibility of a utopia, America has resigned itself to its current, dark narrative.
Links
The federal government continues to wage war on its own cities, and even Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler was teargassed. “I saw nothing which provoked this response.”
Court documents show Department of Homeland Security deployed troops to Portland to teargas and beat up anti-racist protestors, calling it “Operation Diligent Valor.” Federal troops are also on the ground in Kansas City, Chicago, and Albuquerque as part of “Operation Legend.”
Roxane Gay on how to work from home during a pandemic. “22. Realize that your work is profoundly inessential and have a crisis of faith about what you should do with your life.”
Reading
I love a short story anthology and have had good experiences with this Akashic Noir series, in which local authors write crime stories about a particular city for each book. As every crime or detective fiction fan will tell you, a good crime story is just as much about a place, and the social strata of a place, as it is about crime so these books have this nice formula where you get a little guided tour of a city via various characters breaking its laws.
I’m currently reading Portland Noir, and the cool thing about it is that it published the year after I moved from Portland to Denver, so it’s a portrait of a city I love exactly as I left it. I started reading it before stormtroopers descended on the city, but that has added a layer of poignancy I guess. The very first story takes place one block from the last place I lived, but that is where the similarities end, I did not kill anyone there by hitting their head on a radiator. (Related: Activist Raises Awareness That She Used to Live in Portland)
Watching
I watched a bunch of movies last week, including two that everyone else also watched, The Old Guard and Palm Springs. More than four months in, I am honestly so sick of saying that so and so feels especially relevant now but yeah of course they did. One is about these immortal freedom fighter types led by Charlize Theron and they just die over and over again and it feels like nothing is ever getting better but maybe they are getting a little better it’s hard to say really and then this pharma startup guy tries to turn them into medicines and that does not go well for him.
Look at this axe thingy Charlize Theron has.
The other movie is a Groundhog Day story where characters are stuck reliving the day of a wedding in Palm Springs and every day is exactly the same and nothing they do matters but maybe it does matter again it’s hard to say. Totally unbelievable that *spoiler* the couple get together in the end they should have both been like, I need to do some work on myself for a while, but that’s movies you know.
Oh and I watched Spider-Man: Far From Home, which was a delight but when are we getting a new Spider-Verse movie we need it. In summary, all of the movies I watched this week were pretty good.
There you go a full on climate change joint, haven’t done one of those since I don’t know maybe even The Before Times. How’s everybody holding up not good right, yeah I know. Earlier I said to Jamie, you know I’ve just been depressed this week I don’t know why. And she gave me this look and said, well I can think of at least a couple reasons.
Now that we’ve been grinding through this for oh 20 weeks or so, it can be easy to forget that we’re all going through some pretty awful shit and it’s OK to not feel so great about it!
And I think we probably have some rough months ahead I’m sorry to say. But you know what, I’m here with you. Talk to you next week.
‘People who want democracy to happen on their own terms are doing fascism even if they use the language of democracy’
Coloured figures of the birds of the British Islands. 1885-1897.
Last week this infamous letter was published in Harper’s and it was all anyone in the media and academia in particular could talk about. It is a very trolling document and last Friday I was like, you know what, this is so stupid I’m just going to not. But then this week the debate raged on and then Bari Weiss quit and then I listened to and read some things that were really insightful about larger, actually important issues going on behind the letter and thought you know this is some Crisis Palace shit so here we go.
What exactly is The Letter, for those of you blessed enough to have avoided it? It’s an open letter that on its own actually says very little of substance, espousing ideas that would be hard for most to disagree with, such as open debate and tolerance for different ideas. But its shrouded references to specific events and the list of signatories load the document with far greater meaning than any argument it makes.
While it’s signed by almost 150 people, notable names include writers and academics who have come under harsh public scrutiny, mostly online, mostly coming from the left. The message is pretty clear—free speech and high-minded public discourse are in serious danger in America, and the threat is coming from progressives.
no one reached out to me about signing an open letter pertaining to being canceled online, despite me being a professional opinions-haver who has been aggressively canceled online. hmmm i wonder why*
So, you know, people were fucking pissed about it, and it started this whole new debate about “cancel culture.” The premise of cancel culture being that, if you say something that does not conform to an inflexible progressive orthodoxy, you can, in effect, have your life ruined, swiftly and without due process—aka you got canceled bro. And when people get canceled, it makes it so all of us are afraid to express ourselves and we are living in something similar to Stalinist Russia (this is not me exaggerating, it’s something a Yale professor and letter signatory said, for realsies). To be honest, I too have some complaints about illiberal tendencies in certain corners of the left, and there are some components of this argument that I can sympathize with. But you know what it’s Friday and that is no fun so let’s just pretend I made some humble concessions and skip right to the part where I roast it.
Because when you break down the concerns and listen to signatories talking about why they signed, it’s very clear that The Letter is not really about what it claims to be about. In fact, that is The Letter’s defining feature. Instead of being about freedom of expression, for example, it is really about people with high-paying jobs scared of getting fired. But underneath that, The Letter is really about—drumroll—protecting the consolidation of power over who gets to participate in the public sphere, and the abject panic on the part of elites over comparatively minor harms they could incur as that sphere expands.
This was masterfully put by Tressie McMillan Cottom, author and UNC sociologist, on a WBUR radio show last night. In fact, you should really just go listen to that right now instead of reading this, it is the defining take on the letter for my money. She says:
More people than ever before are participating in public life… For someone at an elite social institution, the expansion of public life would feel like a contraction, because their space in the public life has probably contracted. But a greater liberalism was always about increasing access, or so that was what we were told.
She points out that while this relatively small number of academics, who are “overwhelmingly economically secure people,” are complaining about the public sphere being constricted, in reality, entirely new demographics and classes of Americans have been able to participate more fully in the media and academia, even just in the past 50 years (though their participation is still greatly restricted).
We see a similar panic among political centrists, pundits, and lifelong elected officials, sounding the alarm over our “hyperpartisan” or “hyperpolitical” or “hyperpolarized” public discourse. Hyper! But much of this political turmoil was merely tamped down in the past via oppression and disenfranchisement. Perceived glory days of political civility in the US existed in part because huge swaths of the population and certain political ideas were shut out of the arena, with concerns about how the status quo was harming some people left unheard.
Along with power, other concepts that get mangled in the panic over cancel culture are harm and safety. Some of the signatories, including JK Rowling, had their own brushes with cancellation (Rowling is still extremely wealthy and can write whatever she wants whenever she wants), for voicing anti-transgender ideas. When the Harper’s letter came out, Emily VanDerWerff, a writer at Vox who is a trans woman, wrote a response to the leadership at Vox, pointing out that her peer Matt Yglesias signing the letter alongside these figures makes her feel less safe at her job. That may sound dramatic, but keep in mind that anti-trans ideas and policies lead to actual physical harm to transgender people, including the idea that they suffer from a mental disorder.
The response to VanDerWerff’s complaint was swift. For one, letter supporters threw up a flag—see look she admit it, she’s trying to get Yglesias fired for his opinions (she explicitly stated she was not, and he will not be). This is cancel culture in action. But at the same time, VanDerWerff was barraged with actual, literal death threats.
In a recent Ezra Klein podcast featuring an interview with letter signatory Yascha Mounk, Klein, who is the founder of Vox, was livid about VanDerWerff’s treatment. He pointed out the hypocrisy of flying into a panic over a complaint being written to a writer’s boss, but turning your back entirely on another writer receiving death threats for her opinions. Klein is a very nice guy so he chalks this up to a mere blind spot among those who fear cancel culture. That their hearts are in the right place but they are just not being even-handed in how they express their concerns. I am not so sure.
Consider another cherished cancel culture allegory—the firing of NYT opinion editor James Bennett after the Times invited an op-ed from Sen. Tom Cotton calling on armed troops to be deployed to Black Lives Matter protests. Bennett had drawn criticism for years for his ham-handed management of the editorial page, but in this case, readers and colleagues were livid that the Times would run something that might put people in actual harm’s way. This is a rare online cancellation in which someone actually did lose their job, but I suspect Bennett’s career will turn out just fine. Meanwhile, protestors calling for racial justice, also a constitutionally protected form of free speech, are regularly experiencingphysicalbrutality at the hands of local and federal law enforcement.
There is a staggering imbalance in what the supporters of the letter are worried about when it comes to retaliatory harm for speaking out. Their concern over whose speech is protected appears to travel in one direction only, and it is in favor of the most powerful and the least vulnerable.
Speaking of the wave of protests that has been going on, that is one final thing that I would say this letter is actually about. Imagine if you will, a group of highly paid newspaper columnists and tenured professors sounding the alarm that “free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted,” all during a period of surging, historic political engagement. That speaks volumes about what this cohort thinks it means to protect public discourse.
Tressie McMillan Cottom again:
Everywhere in the country for the last 30 or 40 days, people have been out in the streets doing direct democratic action. People care for the first time in what feels like a really long time. People want to know what their budgets look like in their local municipalities, for goodness sake…. People are engaged and paying attention. That is a healthy public life… People who just want democracy to happen on their own terms are doing fascism even if they use the language of democracy. This is an exciting time, and it may be one of our last times to get it right.
This hysteria over imagined mobs of intolerant leftists is a response to the same underlying shift that has people wringing their hands over statues and storefronts during outcries for social justice. It’s the same underlying conditions that cause a couple in khakis to point their guns at peaceful demonstrators marching past their mansion.
People lacking voice, safety, high paying jobs, health care, and housing are rising up and demanding better. And a subset of people who have those things and more are freaking. The fuck. Out.
Links
In Portland, federal police in camouflage, no IDs, in unmarked minivans are grabbing protestors off the streets, even when they aren’t currently engaged in protests. Feds also shot a protestor in the head with “less lethal” weapons.
A detailed examination of revelations of grooming, sexual harassment and abuse in comics, in the context of the industry’s long history of exploiting talent.
John Kerry’s new bipartisan climate org asked Emily Atkin to moderate a conversation between organizer Jamie Margolin and John Kasich, who has a reputation as a Republican who is “good” on climate change. Kasich had no idea what he was talking about and was rude as hell. Bipartisanship!
Nick Tilsen’s statement upon his release from jail following his arrest during the Mount Rushmore protest is very powerful. “We’re not resisting for resistance sake. We’re resisting because we want a better world. A world that works for everybody.”
NYPD has been recorded punching, kicking, tackling, shoving, beating people on the ground over and over again during Black Lives Matter protests. They don’t care they are being filmed because there are zero consequences. You have to wonder what conservatives are thinking about this violence perpetrated by the state just kidding I know exactly what they are thinking!
The awful couple who pointed guns at protestors are awful. Just one example: they live next to a Jewish congregation that started keeping bees near the wall around their mansion as part of Rosh Hashanah celebration and the guy went over to the hives and smashed them, left a note that he smashed them, and demanded they clean it up or he would sue.
In San Francisco, you can adopt and name storm drains. Writer Britta Shoot is adopting drains on alleys named for men, and naming them after her favorite women writers.
I’m in the middle of Paul Tremblay’s Survivor Song which is about people in New England during a pandemic that he wrote long before the real pandemic. I’m a big fan of Paul’s books and this one is no exception.
Months ago when I heard @paulGtremblay had a virus novel coming out in July I thought oh I wish I could read it now during quarantine that would be perfect. Well Survivor Song is out today and I guess be careful what you wish for.
I know everyone already saw it but Knives Out was a true delight. Rian Johnson is great and also Last Jedi was way better than the Abrams movies sorry do not cancel me comments disabled goodbye.
Oooh boy this was quite a week wasn’t it. Sometimes it feels like nothing is happening and we are all just sitting around reading or watching TV and cooking and doing dishes but also simultaneously the world is on goddamned fire. Meanwhile, people are just ambiently dying of a disease with no vaccine and a subset of the population is locked behind glass indefinitely.
You never know how things turn out, but man it really is starting to seem like the covid story in the US is going to be: We all rallied together and fought back a dangerous disease but then after two months we got sick of it and wanted to go to the gym and decided it would be fine if another 100,000 people died.
Real cranky one this week turned up the dial on the old crankotron and just left it there.
Reducing the struggle to a time-limited, painful means to an end
American ornithology, or, The natural history of the birds of the United States, 1808-1814.
There’s an attitude in the nonprofit world OK could be the white nonprofit world OK could just be white progressives in general of which I am one fyi, but I have come to think of it as a fetishization of hard work toward a goal as the path to social change. It makes a certain amount of sense in the nonprofit setting because, after all, it is a job in a workplace, where people work on things. And yeah, there is work to be done.
But I’ve been thinking about this fixation lately because, in this latest wave of popular demands for racial justice, I’ve noticed it echoed in the efforts of white people or people in general striving to be anti-racist. I write about this topic with a little trepidation because I don’t want to come off as pissy or self-righteous (not too self-righteous, at least winky emoji) about a historic reckoning with structural racism. We are all out here just doing our best I am not some arbiter of what is the right way to be an anti-racist.
But there is a kind of grim joylessness that shows up in a lot of white anti-racism discourse, and it’s a very similar framing that appears in climate activism, electoral politics, all kinds of arenas. It’s a view of social change as this relentless breaking of rocks, which I fear limits people’s ability to maintain a lasting commitment to it, and otherwise reduces it to a sort of time-limited, painful means to an end that I don’t think reflects how it usually plays out.
In a recent interview, Crisis Palace fave Jia Tolentino put it like this:
I’m also suspicious of the way that Not Being Racist is a project that people seem to be approaching like boot camp. To deepen your understanding of race, of this country, should make you feel like the world is opening up, like you’re dissolving into the immensity of history and the present rather than being more uncomfortably visible to yourself. Reading more Black writers isn’t like taking medicine. People ought to seek out the genuine pleasure of decentering themselves, and read fiction and history alongside these popular anti-racist manuals, and not feel like they need to calibrate their precise degree of guilt and goodness all the time.
(Editor’s note: I found this interview via Ann Friedman’s Instagram and just before sending this saw that she wrote about it in her newsletter this week too I promise I did not copy her even though she is the best.)
In small ways, you see it in the posting of an article with a comment like “we have so much work to do,” or “doing the work” or “know I have so much work to do on myself.” Or, depending on the personality type, some of us take it on like a self-improvement project, akin to joining crossfit or starting a yoga class. I fear that it boils down the participation in social change into a checking off of boxes, or to use nonprofit lingo, a list of metrics and deliverables.
In the literal nonprofit world, the consequences of this attitude are more material. I saw it a lot in my past work in the sector, wherein it is made clear that anything an individual accepts as personal comfort—be that time not spent working or money earned—is a necessary evil. There is endless work to be done toward a just world, and unless you are working toward it as hard as you possibly can, you are a drain on the cause. This is a broad generalization of the environment at a lot of, but not every nonprofit, and I do suspect it may be getting better in recent years. But there’s often this mix of self-flagellation and competition to out-sacrifice (which is at least partially due to the fact that most nonprofits pay low salaries so attract a lot of people from privileged backgrounds). It’s like there’s this big balance sheet in which you are constantly exchanging hard work for progress. And the sheet will never, ever be balanced.
I grew a distaste for this attitude as it exists in philanthropy, where it’s often called “strategic philanthropy,” a corporatized approach to funding social change that literally demands a positive, measurable return on investment from its practitioners. Strategy has its uses, but in funding especially, it can become a straitjacket, frequently imposed by people in positions of power.
So what do I recommend instead? What’s my bright idea? Well I don’t know! Because on one hand, I do think that we call it the struggle for a reason, and that freedom is a constant struggle. On climate change, for example, I’m deeply suspicious of narratives that climate catastrophe can be avoided in any just or equitable way without serious sacrifice. Meaningful change takes work and pain, and white people legitimately have a whole lot of sacrifice and decentering to do. I mean, honestly, when people say things like, so much work to do, they are often just talking about reading some books, some bare minimum stuff. So there is an evil twin to the case I am making that says, “oh let’s not make anti-racism or social change too hard, because if we do, people just won’t want to do it.” That is not the way, and it betrays the need to be in solidarity with those of us who don’t have the privilege of picking and choosing just how much to struggle.
On the other hand, I don’t think constant struggle means constant suffering, rather it’s that liberation is not something that ever ends in a neat conclusion or a job well done, as Angela Davis puts in the speech referenced above, “historical closures.” This very interminability of the struggle is likely why so many people never engage with it. It also means that our engagement with it needs to be made sustainable. You might think of this as another version of prefigurative politics I’ve been writing about lately, as it relates to lifestyle environmentalism or civil resistance, wherein we try to live the values of the world we are fighting for. Otherwise you run the risk of recreating different kinds of suffering and injustices, only for a good cause.
So yes, social change is and should be a struggle, but I’d like to think that pain and discomfort are just one part of it. It also involves the joy and discovery that Jia Tolentino describes, and camaraderie and connection to community, Solnit’s paradise of participating, where activism is the “vale where souls get made.” Whether it’s being anti-racist, transitioning to a carbon-free society, creating an economy where everyone has the same dignity and security and freedom to thrive, we’re talking about building a better world. Rather than merely breaking rocks, that could mean shifting to a profoundly different approach to life, one that changes every aspect of it, the painful and the joyful.
Apparently @NPR is unwilling to write that even saying white power is racist, needing outside attribution. Can’t be viewed as biased against people who say white power I guess. pic.twitter.com/JSZ5YM0Ug8
Public health experts are exhausted and devastated by the way the US (but let’s be real the White House and Republican governors) squandered our chance to get COVID-19 under control. “It didn’t have to be this way.”
People opposed to government restrictions used to point to Sweden as an example of fighting coronavirus while not hindering the economy. Now the country’s deaths are much higher than its neighbors and its economy is just as bad. “They literally gained nothing.”
“Phoenix is hot” articles by national outlets are hit or miss, but this one is good. Special attention paid to the difference in temps across neighborhoods by income levels. And the possibility of a “Hurricane Katrina-size heat disaster.”
One sad part of the American tragedy is the way so many of us sincerely think that life is better here than in other places. Even now that we are the pariah state.
Here’s a good aerial video of Boston’s completely bonkers illegal fireworks primal scream from last weekend.
I’m going to catch up with a few books I recently wrapped up the first one is The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George Higgins. I’ve always sort of known about this book as every crime writer’s favorite crime novel. I guess it’s nominally a caper book but it’s more like a slice of life book that is about professional criminals. I’ve never read anything quite like it, it’s like listening to people talk.
Next up is Circe by Madeleine Miller. I’m honestly not that interested in Greek mythology and had to read the Odyssey for like four classes in school and did not love it. But by now, it is no secret that Circe is such a great book. The big take home for me? Heroes are monsters.
One more – I finished No Longer Human by Junji Ito, an epic manga horror-style graphic novel interpretation of Osamu Dazai’s classic Japanese novel by the same name. Recommended by Jason at Floating World. This is an incredible piece of work, but I honestly have a hard time recommending it to anyone it as it is extremely disturbing, depths of the human experience stuff. It took me forever to read because it is long and I could only handle a scene or two at a time. I’m glad I did though, powerful, haunting work, and weirdly beautiful. If you want, you can email me and I’ll tell you if I think you should read it.
This is from the cover.
Watching
Two movie picks this week can you tell I’m feeling guilty about missing a week. First is Invisible Man, a very very loose adaptation of the classic horror movie. Also probably not for everyone be sure to read the synopsis first could be triggering. But a great movie Elizabeth Moss is an amazing actress she is also a scientologist. Second is Ingrid Goes West, a dark comedy from the halcyon days of 2017 starring Aubrey Plaza. Both of these are anti-tech in their own way so if that’s your thing.
Listening
Svalbard this metal band I like has a new song out that is good and has a cool video. An emerging theme this week is this is not for everyone.
I’ve been living on the east coast for almost a decade now but I still audibly gasp at the sight of a lightning bug
I am sorry I took a holiday last Friday and did not warn you in advance I hope you were able to find a bunch of bad news and swears without me.
One development since my last email is that one of our little dogs Mumu had what we thought was a torn ligament but turns out is just an injury to her Achilles tendon. So no surgery at this point, but she does have this tiny little splint she has to wear that is very sad but honestly kind of adorable too. It even has a little thigh-high boot that slips over it for when she goes outside.
Resting, healing, figuring out new ways to get by in difficult times, but still trying to have a little pop of fashion while doing so. In a sense, we are all Mumu.
