Newsletter

44: The Letter

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‘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.

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 experiencing physical brutality 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!
  • Julian Brave NoiseCat on why the McGirt Supreme Court ruling is a historic victory for Tribes.
  • I fucking hate plastic. Here’s a photo spread of its return to dominance during COVID.
  • 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 would really love one of these backyard shed offices.

Reading

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.

Listening

Watching

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.

Tate

43: Historical closures

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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.

Links

  • 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.”
  • Millions more properties are vulnerable to flood damage than previously thought.
  • “Capitalist individualism has turned into a death cult.” Jia Tolentino does not hold back in this interview.
  • Nobody talks about race the way they do in Ziwe’s funny and unsettling interviews. You keep watching them and then you keep thinking about them.
  • A heartwarming article from February about Mel Brooks and the late Carl Reiner’s 70-year friendship.
  • We are living inside several Paul Verhoeven movies at once—especially his “bizarre masterwork” Starship Troopers.
  • 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.

Arizona’s coronavirus cases are literally off the charts.

Reading

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.

We are deep into the summer now folks.

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.

Tate

42: Stars seemed aligned

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The impacts of protests are often profound but unpredictable

Boston with its environs in 1775 & 1776

The scale of the protests against police violence and systemic racism over the past few weeks is unprecedented. Demonstrations are happening in all 50 states, even in small conservative towns with mostly white populations, and something like one in five Americans have participated in one. In Boston, huge crowds have assembled all over the city. And here, as in many places, one of the rallying cries has been to defund the police—or more specifically, to divert police budgets toward underfunded city services that are better suited to deal with social problems than paramilitary units.

This week, Boston had its first opportunity to answer that call, with a Wednesday council vote on the city’s operating budget. The political will seemed to be there for something big to happen. Mayor Marty Walsh has been paying lip service to fighting systemic racism; our new city council is more diverse and progressive than it’s ever been, serving a city that skews left, but is notoriously racist by several measures.

Walsh’s offering under pressure was to carve out $12 million from the police overtime budget to divert to social services, even echoing a progressive rallying cry as he announced it, that “racism is a public health crisis.” At one point, $12 million in funding may have seemed like a bold move, but now, for many, it seemed nowhere near what is necessary.

Ricardo Arroyo, the freshman councilor who represents my district and whose campaign I volunteered on, said as much and more in his testimony during the tense meeting Wednesday. Visibly emotional, he reminded the council of the absurdity of certain budget priorities that have become foregone conclusions, year in year out. A $12 million reallocation may sound like a lot, after all, it represents a 20% cut. To BPD’s overtime budget. The total police budget, on the other hand, remains the city’s second biggest line item at $414 million, four times the budget of say the Boston Public Health Commission.

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.”

Other councilors made similar impassioned arguments that the budget was still not nearly good enough, that it did not rise to what the moment was demanding of them. In previous meetings, the councilors had heard hours of testimony from the public similarly asking for cuts to the police budget. The night before, hundreds rallied outside City Hall to call for greater funds to be redirected (groups were asking for 10% of the total police budget), including some protestors who chained themselves together and shut down an intersection. The stars seemed aligned for something big, so surely the mayor’s budget was rejected, right? No, as you may have guessed, it passed with an 8-to-5 vote, thanks to a yes vote from every white city council member, which includes those considered the city’s “old guard” aka guys who look like extras from The Departed.

So yeah, they just weren’t having it. That night it was kind of hard to swallow the outcome after all of the buildup, all of the excitement, all of the news from around the country. Jamie and I were talking about how disappointing it was, but at the same time, knowing Boston politics, how it would have also been a truly remarkable turn of events if the budget had been rejected. You still kind of get this feeling like, if we can’t do something like this now, at a time when the earth feels like it is shaking under our feet with demands for something different, what exactly are we doing here?

The thing I try to remember, though, is that the goal of any protest or social movement is never, or almost never at least, one policy outcome. That’s maybe the biggest misconception about why people protest. You hear it all the time (although I think less often lately) from usually sort of mild-mannered dudes a bit left of center, who just don’t see what protests are trying to accomplish. What, after all, do those Occupy people even want? What are their demands? Not very strategic if you ask me, they say. We heard it from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who passed a package of police reform legislation, and then announced the need for demonstrations was now over: “You don’t need to protest, you won. You accomplished your goal.”

But they are not stopping. Because the goal, as we talked about a couple weeks ago, is to create a world in which what once seemed like common sense now seems like nonsense. Where progress that previously seemed impossible now seems inevitable. On Wednesday, a clear line was drawn between the city’s leaders who realize they are living in that emerging world, and those who still think they are living in the old one.

If mass protest doesn’t bring about change to something structural and movable like a city budget, you still might wonder if it really does anything at all. For that question, I will turn to this must-read article from Zeynep Tufekci, “Do Protests Even Work?” I highly recommend Tufekci’s 2017 book Twitter and Tear Gas, but she covers a lot of her points from that book in this terse essay that came out this week.

The answer is, yes, of course protests work, but usually not in the way and timeframe that many people think. Protests sometimes look like failures in the short term, but much of the power of protests is in their long-term effects, on both the protesters themselves and the rest of society.

She points out that the impacts of protests are often profound, but unpredictable, in a few ways. They change people’s minds. They change culture. They change individuals’ lives, hooking them on activism for a lifetime. And, maybe most importantly, they erode the legitimacy of power structures.

The Boston old guard is slow to change, but they are slipping behind. A recent poll found that 84% of Massachusetts residents support the Black Lives Matter movement. Similar majorities support broad police reforms. Half of respondents now say police budgets should be reduced and diverted. On that last point, one telling quote came from a white Franklin resident who said, “I find it kind of silly we haven’t done it yet.”

That’s what a social movement does. And if it’s strong enough, even the most entrenched power structures eventually crumble beneath it.

Pretty nice sunset in the neighborhood the other night.

Links

  • Captain John “Jack” Danilecki, aka Pepper Jack, is known for his brutality and has six active investigations against him. He was also the second-highest paid city employee last year, taking home $350,000.
  • Target, Google, Bank of America and Microsoft fund police through private donations to police foundations.
  • The advocate who tells the stories of people killed by hit-and-runs.
  • Thirteen states have criminalized protests against new fossil fuel infrastructure.
  • It’s going to be very hot all summer.
  • Climate change is increasing risks during pregnancy, and Black mothers and babies are harmed at much higher rates.
  • Saguaro cactuses are threatened by climate change, drought, invasive plants like buffelgrass and stinknet, and various human impacts. One gem from this story: saguaros are starting to grow on northern-facing slopes for the first time to avoid the heat.
  • Don’t be afraid to love what you love, even if it’s “live, laugh, love.”
  • If you just want to read someone saying nice things about someone they love, I recommend this Roxane Gay essay.
  • Since its rushed reopening in late May, Arizona has become an epicenter of the pandemic. “No state has seen its rate of hospitalizations increase more rapidly since Memorial Day,” with record use of inpatient beds and ventilators. More per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even hard-hit Brazil. Until recently, the state had prohibited cities from requiring masks, but now city councils are all scrambling to stop the bleeding with state government MIA.

Listening

Teardrops, Cory Wong and Jon Batiste

I’m not a comics journalist or connected to the industry or anything like that, but for some reason it feels necessary to point out that Warren Ellis, a writer I’ve been a huge fan of for years and whose work I’ve recommended here before, has been using his status to coerce women into sexual relationships for years, according to many people who recently came forward. This is the first time one of the many revelations about abusive men in power has come about concerning someone whose work holds a really big place in my life. And it is horrible and very sad.

Horrible mostly for the women he treated terribly, for the careers he meddled with and those he likely ruined or discouraged. It’s horrible because he was known for challenging people in power in his work, championing young writers and artists, and supporting women creators. But there was clearly an abusive side to all of that, and his awful behavior is a betrayal to so, so many people, of which I am just one very tiny casualty. I don’t have much else to say, except I guess remember that men in power do awful things, and even when they mean a lot to us, especially then, they don’t get a pass.

Watching

Sopranos S3. Some good episodes, but the show noticeably declined in this season. Lot of gabagool. Solid mental health advice from Carmine Lupertazzi though:

I take pictures of the TV while I’m watching it.

Stay safe and healthy out there especially if you are in Arizona good god. A lot of stuff opening up here and our numbers are looking better but I still don’t think a restaurant or bar is in my near-term future. We are planning a trip to Western Massachusetts in August as kind of a consolation vacation, where we will sit in a cabin in the woods instead of our living room for 10 days despite all of the scary books and movies that have taught me that this is a bad idea. I think it will be fine though.

Get some air if you can. Do some more of the kind of zooms you like and not as many of the kind of zooms you don’t like. Be a better friend to yourself.

Tate

41: Social justice warriors

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We look back on this chapter in history with self-congratulatory warmth, but loathed it as it happened

The Monk by the Sea (German: Der Mönch am Meer) by Caspar David Friedrich 1808-10

Last year, a person you might remember named Barack Obama was addressing a group of wealthy liberal donors and cautioned against the Democratic Party leaning too far toward the views of “certain left-leaning Twitter feeds” or “the activist wing of our party.” It upset a lot of people, and even though he also said “that’s not a criticism of the activist wing,” there was something dismissive about his phrasing that stung, coming from a president who basically campaigned and at least initially tried to run an administration on the basis of wanting to change the system. In fact, you would hope that any elected official left of the GOP would consider activism—fighting to bring about social change—the entire job description.

Even if you give Obama the benefit of the doubt on his comments, there seems to be a widespread sentiment out there that an activist is a marginal voice—someone not to be taken seriously, who is unrealistic or inauthentic, or is merely performing for an audience.

In a recent This American Life, my favorite radio show to swear at, a correspondent did some fly on the wall reporting at a popular New York bodega in the midst of protests against racist police brutality. She spent a lot of time on these two perhaps overly intense protestors who came across as these cartoonish posers, like get a load of these screwballs. When one of them started explaining why they were out protesting, she interrupted him half-laughing, “Wait, are you reciting a speech?”

This also shows up in the way that, whenever there is any mass movement that breaks into public consciousness, there is this sneaking suspicion of anyone who organized it, worked on it professionally, or provided or accepted money to do so. It’s as though demands for change, to be deemed authentic, must be entirely spontaneous and made up of only real people, those who have zero ideology.

Around the time of the Climate Strikes in September, journalists were awestruck that a mere child like Greta Thunberg could singlehandedly stir such a response in millions of otherwise inert people, ignoring the armies of organizers who spent months pulling the events together. Or on the flipside, any whiff of professional organizing was portrayed with deep suspicion—the fix was in.

Black activists are invalidated in particularly aggressive ways, as Keisha Blain and Tom Zoellner wrote recently, through the use of language like “riots,” “mobs,” and “chaos.” “These words are often used to delegitimize and dismiss Black movements – to make them appear too far removed from civil society to be taken seriously.” It cannot be said enough that in the years before he was killed, 63% of Americans had unfavorable views of Martin Luther King, Jr. and in 1964, 74% of Americans thought that civil rights demonstrations were more likely to hurt the cause than help it. We look back on this chapter in our history with self-congratulatory warmth, but loathed it as it happened.

The term activist is also used as a cudgel against journalists who openly acknowledge injustice. Often, young journalists and journalists of color especially are labeled with the qualification of activists or activist-journalists or activist-writers (there is a good article I think by Doreen St. Felix about this somewhere but I can’t find it sorry), as a way to signal that this person shouldn’t be taken seriously or you gotta take what they write with a grain of salt.

In 2016, The Nation published a baffling hit piece on three Black journalists working at MTV News at the time, pointing out that they lack “prestigious resumes,” and gain their legitimacy instead through their “well-oiled personal brands.” In the article, Wei Tchou dismissively referred to Ezekiel Kweku, Doreen St. Félix, and Ira Madison III as “young activist-writers entrenched in identity politics.” All three have gone on to outshine MTV News or The Nation, for that matter, with St. Félix now at the New Yorker which is just a little bit prestigious. There is now a delicious series of corrections and a formal apology from Tchou at the top of that article as it resides online. When Nikole Hannah-Jones’ 1619 Project first launched in the New York Times—before it was awarded a Pulitzer, picked up as a book series, and adapted into classroom curriculum—asshole Andrew Sullivan hissed, “The New York Times Has Abandoned Liberalism for Activism.”

The worst cases of this type of disgust come from a certain type of centrist academic or writer like Sullivan. The only thing these guys can’t stand more than Trump and other retrograde forces in American politics are the very people trying to fight them. The most representative of these contrarian voices is Steven Pinker. Nathan J. Robinson wrote of Pinker, in a profile titled “The World’s Most Annoying Man”:

What’s maddening about Pinker’s body of recent work is that it attacks the very people who are doing the most to address the problems he says he cares about. Progress is made by progressives, as Jeremy Lent pointed out, and it’s yesterday’s “social justice warriors” that are responsible for the declines in racist language and corporal punishment that Pinker shows off as accomplishments of Our Great Liberal Democratic Capitalist Order. … As my friend Sam Miller McDonald put it, “most of those good things that Steven Pinker likes to brag about came about because of the hard work and sacrifice of the kind of people Steven Pinker likes to complain about.”

So what is up with this American pastime of hating activists?

Clearly, this bothers me, and the question came to mind again when reading this book I’m in the middle of called A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit who I talk about here all the time she’s one of my favorite writers. The book is generally about the positive societal outcomes that have emerged from disasters throughout history, but in one section she explores how our culture’s capacity for expressing love and finding meaning in life is artificially confined to the personal and the private.

“…it describes no role for citizenship and no need for social change or engagement. Popular culture feeds on this privatized sense of self. A recent movie about political activists proposed that they opposed the government because they had issues with their fathers. The implication was that the proper sphere of human activity is personal, that there is no legitimate reason to engage with public life, that the very act of engaging is juvenile, blindly emotional, a transference of the real sources of passion.

…

We are often told of public and political life merely as a force, a duty, and occasionally a terror. But it is sometimes also a joy. The human being you recognize in reading, for example, Tom Paine’s Rights of Man or Nelson Mandela’s autobiography is far larger than this creature of family and erotic life. That being has a soul, ethics, ideals, a chance at heroism, at shaping history, a set of motivations based on principles.

For most people, activism or something like it is a very rare experience, one of “citizenship itself, of playing a role in public life, of being connected to strangers around you and thereby to that abstraction we call society.”

I think there’s something to that, as a means of explaining our disdain for activism. In American culture, our self-worth is wrapped up almost entirely in our commitment to ourselves and our own families, often through career achievements. Or maybe our church, which can have its own rewards, but still constricts the scope with which we can outwardly experience love and meaning.

Doing so or watching others do so makes people uncomfortable. For many, sincerity and passion for something beyond self interest feels inauthentic, what is this some kind of speech? Our perception of public life, of citizenship, is seen as a deviation or a lesser version of ourselves. The individual rules. The communal is weakness or maybe sickness. Or at least, annoyance.

At the risk of optimism, I have some hope that what we are seeing now, starting with our most admirable responses to the pandemic, is a reawakening of the communal sense of self. That maybe it sparked there, and erupted into the public demonstrations we’re seeing now, day in, day out, every weekend. Polling now shows that, by a 28-point margin, a majority of American voters support the Black Lives Matter movement, up from a 17-point margin before the most recent wave of protests began. That means that in two weeks, support for the movement grew almost as much as it had in the previous two years.

So maybe one or both of these shockwaves is breaking something open in us. With our, at least temporary, realization that we all need this dimension of our lives, it becomes less absurd, less cartoonish to watch other people pursuing it.

Links

  • Community policing is a popular concept in Boston but it is perhaps not so good. “There are countless other ways to address harm that don’t include people with guns patrolling a neighborhood.”
  • National racial justice protests swayed a Texas town to vote against expanding fracking, due to concerns over environmental racism.
  • Surrounding communities in Boston are outraged over plans to extend the life of the polluting Mystic Generating Station.
  • There are airborne microscopic plastic particles—everywhere. In the snow, the rain, the wind. We are breathing plastic. “What do you do with that?”
  • A petrochemical lobbying group recently advanced anti-protest legislation.
  • Look out new Phoebe Bridgers drops this weekend here’s another interview.
  • Here are the 98 cities where protestors have been tear-gassed by police. Also tear gas is a chemical weapon designed to inflict suffering there is zero appropriate use for it.

Watching

Season 2 of Killing Eve, the greatest.

Listening

Breezin 1976, George Benson

I Endorse

Scented candles. Scented candles are doing a lot of heavy lifting in what you might call the wellness department around this house lately. You have to figure if you are mostly stuck at home for three months and counting, the place should smell nice and if possible like a variety of different nice smells. I just did a quick inventory and there are at least 13 scented candles in our apartment. That sounds like a lot and like maybe we have a candle problem, but to be fair, two of them were accidentally sent to us. Which I guess says something about the volume of candles you’re buying when you start getting candles you didn’t even order.

You gotta be careful too, candles are like furniture in that you have to spend a little money to get something decent, but they can also get randomly expensive for no apparent reason. A few favorites are Woodsmoke by Brooklyn Candle, which make solid, reasonably priced candles. There’s also a nice Creosote candle from Bisbee Soap and Sundry (they make a great Creosote hand salve too). And we have a few candles from HausWitch out of Salem, Mass., some of which have crystals embedded in them, which may be a thing that you want.

That candle thing reminds me of this time we randomly met some good friends in rural Pennsylvania for a long weekend. It ended up being kind of a grim part of rural Pennsylvania and the weather was awful so we decided to drive to this old haunted house that was haunted by monkeys but had been converted into a large candle store with every room in the house filled with candles, even in the bathroom a bathtub was filled with candles. But there was also a haunted monkey house museum in the basement. And a big monster monkey statue outside.

This is all 100% true and the worst part is that those candles smelled terrible we ended up throwing them out. We did manage to briefly go kayaking here’s a picture from that.

I miss doing things like that. Not the monkey house part but you know the overall gist of it. In my heart of hearts right now, you and I are in that kayak together, reader, paddling around in the fog, not sure where we are headed but here we are with our tiny lifejackets and little paddles just trying to keep this thing upright.

Tate

40: A fear of what comes next

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Things that do a better job of solving problems we currently entrust with men carrying tools that cause death and pain

Epomops francqueti. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London.

One time I was interviewing someone at a foundation that funds climate work and he posed to me this question: If you magically had the power to do so, would you get rid of fossil fuels today? Fortunately, it was rhetorical and he answered it himself, no of course you wouldn’t, it would cause mass global suffering. Which I guess is true in one sense at least because all of these people would be up in the air flying around in airplanes and then the airplanes would suddenly have no fuel and probably crash I’m not sure I do not know a lot about airplanes. All of my readers who are pilots please respond with what you would do if your airplane spontaneously had no fuel. 

I am trolling, that is not what he meant when he posed that question, and was really just trying to make the point that there are different ways to change the world, and moving too fast can cause a lot of pain. 

But I imagine that when some people hear terms like abolition and defunding of police, which have astonishingly become mainstream ideas in like a single week (albeit not among Democratic leadership) they get freaked out because it sounds like something similar to my funny little scenario—that they are in mid-air traveling in an airplane and people are demanding that airplanes immediately stop existing.

A less silly way of putting this is, there is a misconception that abolition—and defunding as a means of getting there—is a solely subtractive action. When in fact, it’s a process of imagining the world that we are morally bound to pursue, and then going about the business of constructing it, while dismantling what was there before.

I think that misconception of abolition as a subtractive endeavor is one of many reasons people fear the idea, a fear that usually manifests in calling it preposterous, or utter nonsense (Mitt Romney marched in the streets with BLM but said “it would be nuts” to reduce our commitment to police). This has been a topic that I am not any kind of expert in but one that I’ve been learning more about over the past few years and that I think about a lot in the context of climate change or whatever really. For a long time I would personally hear the term abolition, specifically prison abolition, and think sure it sounds great but also like a far-fetched or academic concept. As I wrote about a while ago, Why Prisons Are Obsolete in particularwas a really influential book for me, on how I think about prisons for one, but also just activism in general. 

(OK look, I’m going to say right here that I am painfully aware of how it sounds for a middle-aged white guy to be like oh I read an Angela Davis book and look at me I’m an abolitionist but we’re all on a journey here and I will accept your eye rolling I can take it.)

The way she describes abolition as an act of imagination and creation and putting in place a continuum of new structures that replace the need for incarceration resonated with me and put words to a lot of things I had been thinking about and words against things I had been struggling with. I more recently listened to this great interview with Mariame Kaba on Call Your Girlfriend that was making the rounds all week for good reason, as she also describes this same idea in a way that is very powerful, but at the same time, just sounds like common sense. 

To me that is a huge part of what I had always thought of more broadly as an activist mindset, but I’m learning could be more specifically described as abolitionist. Instead of saying, where are we and what changes could we make to deliver some short-term improvements in the moment, it’s asking, what is intolerable about where we are now, and how do we get to a place where that thing is gone. It’s a process of making what may seem like nonsense right now into the only sensible outcome, while revealing what currently seems to be inevitable as complete nonsense.

“It should be remembered that the ancestors of many of today’s most ardent liberals could not have imagined life without slavery, life without lynching, or life without segregation,” Davis writes.

I had always thought of this as seeking transformative versus incremental change, but as Kaba describes it, you can be an abolitionist working on anything from housing to climate. The distinction as I see it is that, for a reformist, even in advocacy on the left, the starting point is always what is possible today. It’s often painted as a more pragmatic approach toward a shared goal, but that critically different framing can direct your actions, knowingly or unknowingly, toward a completely different, if not opposite outcome.

For example, with the very alluring 8 Can’t Wait campaign that caught a lot of attention recently (don’t feel bad if you posted it remember it’s a journey), criticism quickly emerged that these are actually not the right strategies for stopping racist police violence. The response from supporters was, hang on, this is not our end goal, it’s just a starting point that we can do right now. But the question is not about now versus later or small vs big, it’s about the trajectory it puts you on. And the strategies of 8 Can’t Wait would increase funding for police and further entrench our reliance on them. 

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.

There are, in fact, incremental steps you can take toward abolition, what Kaba calls “non-reformist reforms.” In an opinion she co-wrote, the authors state that “abolition is both a lodestar and a practical necessity. Central to abolitionist work are the many fights for non-reformist reforms — those measures that reduce the power of an oppressive system while illuminating the system’s inability to solve the crises it creates.” Reformist reforms like piling on more training or rules are merely “asking police not to be police.” 

So back to “would you get rid of fossil fuels today” question, the funny thing about it is, while making a perfectly pragmatic point, it was being used at the time to defend a foundation’s continued investments in the fossil fuel industry. Investments that, I would argue, are not part of a responsible, incremental transition away from oil and gas, but a perpetuation of them. Just as in 8 Can’t Wait, there are strategies—like working with oil and gas companies, or spending billions on new natural gas infrastructure—that could seem like they are a means toward a shared goal, but they are pointing in the wrong direction. Reformist reforms that further lock us into a system that needs to go away. 

Much like defunding the police, the fossil fuel divest/invest movement and efforts to block the supply side through pipeline protests have inspired new hope and imagination among activists, while also striking fear and anxiety into others. A fear of going too far. A fear of losing money. A fear of losing structures that offer the illusion of comfort and safety—for some. A fear of what comes next, because nobody knows exactly what would come next if we abolished police. And it can be hard to know what steps lead in the right direction.

Getting over those fears is not easy, and the uncertainty never really goes away. But in recognizing that we’re in a process of creating and evolving, instead of merely tearing down, that frightening outcome can go from sounding preposterous, to sounding like the only sensible path. 

Related:

Links

Watching

Speaking of lighthearted, I got back into iZombie the comedy detective horror show by the creator of Veronica Mars and Party Down. But surprise, in season 4 it takes a dark turn and imagines a Seattle that is walled off after the zombie virus runs rampant, and under siege by a private security company that publicly executes people with a giant anvil. Yes, yes I know. But it is still a very clever, very funny, and suddenly weirdly radical show.

Huge spoiler alert: Fans of Veronica Mars will be delighted to watch Logan Echolls get an anvil dropped on his head.

I feel like this one did not have enough pictures or little funny things but I don’t know what to tell you people. I have a template for this newsletter and in this spot it says “CUTE LITTLE ENDING” so maybe on days when I can’t think of a little story from the week I’ll just close with that and it will be our little way of communicating that I just didn’t have it in me today. There doesn’t always have to be a cute little ending I guess JUST LIKE in LIFE.

Have a lovely weekend I got a new lamp coming tomorrow gonna get that set up.

Tate

39: Frustration and fury

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The things that are deemed acceptable and not acceptable during the pursuit

Fauna boreali-americana, or, The zoology of the northern parts of British America :.London :John Murray,1829-1837.

Even speaking as someone who likes to go on and on about the potential speed and power of social movements, it has been astounding to see the response to the latest cases of police killing Black people in the United States. It’s part of a movement that in its modern form has been going since around 2013, but this latest wave seems to be reaching people it did not before. And the conversation feels different too, still somewhat about reforms around the edges (of the kind Minneapolis has been enacting for years before George Floyd was murdered), but also more people calling for abolition, defunding, and otherwise undoing decades of increasing police militarization and control over communities.

One thing that does not feel new is something that I’ve been struggling a lot with this past week, both in my own reactions and in conversations with others. That is this persistent way in which white people, even if we are supportive of racial justice, tend to cordon off and separate ourselves from certain aspects of social change that make us feel uncomfortable.

This is an understandable response to some extent, but it inevitably becomes a form of paternalism over people who are fighting for their own right to exist and by extension, for all of us. And it’s mostly shown up lately in the form of carving out what people consider peaceful protest from what they consider violent protest.

I find this tricky to talk about, because there’s a version of this that is thoughtful and based on good intentions and accurate information. For example, it’s true that many of the people resorting to property damage are likely random actors exercising some form of opportunism or at least white privilege. Movement leaders have called out such people during protests and in print. It’s also true that in these demonstrations, police are instigating the violence, through their appearance, their weapons, their numbers, their crowd control tactics, their eager overreactions to minor nuisances. You watch it happen repeatedly, the sort of main demonstration happens, during which police are mostly sidelined. They stand around with their batons, maybe take selfies with some naive protestors, and mostly wait. Then that phase starts to wind down, and a switch flips, and all of a sudden here we go it’s Call of Duty time. Groups of cops often armed to the teeth close in, start cornering people, marching in formation, taking potshots, and rounding people up.

So on one hand, it’s important not to lump everyone together, and it’s important to call out who is fucking things up and who is being the real aggressor.

But I worry that when we focus too much on separating protestors into different buckets, it can turn into something else. And I don’t mean awful people on Facebook or Trump himself or All Lives Matter kind of people, I mean people who really care about what is happening can start drawing artificial lines that dictate what is legitimate and strategic.

Just as police can’t credibly say that everyone who broke a law in a demonstration was an “outside agitator” who drove in from out of town, as police always try to do, neither can a self-appointed critic of a social movement, trying to feel more comfortable about a cause they are supporting. And that leads to an inevitable divvying up, by a white person who may legitimately care about racial justice, of the things that are deemed acceptable and the things that are not acceptable during its pursuit. (Another version of this, incidentally, is the line of acceptability often drawn between protests of today and past eras, always misguidedly invoking MLK.)

That’s not to say that people don’t have good reasons for being opposed to and concerned about violence. There is the moral argument that it’s just never OK to resort to certain acts. I would consider myself a nonviolent person, but unlike some people, for me, this is a world in which it has been exceedingly easy to remain nonviolent. As Elie Mystal wrote, “I would never throw a rock at the police. I would never throw a brick through the window of a big-box store. I would never set fire to an office building. But I want to. I understand why some people do.” And as Soraya Nadia McDonald wrote in her essay, “Why we can’t stop thinking about George Floyd’s neck” (CW descriptions of violence):

…when our collective necks are threatened, when we are finally forced to do away with civility and politesse because all other options for insisting upon our own humanity have been exhausted, there are white counterparts who remain quizzical about our frustration and fury. We are left reminding our fellow countrymen and women of the quotation widely attributed to Malcolm X: “That’s not a chip on my shoulder, that’s your boot on my neck.”

Then there’s the strategic argument, essentially, that protests that cross certain lines will set back a cause. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about a related topic in the book Why Civil Resistance Works, about nonviolent resistance campaigns being more effective than violent ones in bringing about regime change. It’s a very compelling case and I’d be really interested in hearing what the authors have to say about current events, but to be clear, their study was looking at a very different kind of violent insurgency campaign. They also never discount violent tactics entirely, and point out that even nonviolent resistance is very confrontational. Anyway, this is frequently debated in the context of the Civil Rights Movement, and recently Princeton researcher Omar Wasow has made the case that violent protests swung the 1968 election toward Nixon. Which may be worrisome with an election months away, although even if true, I find it debatable that you can point to one election, or presidential politics in general, as an indicator of overall forward or backward progress.

But I say all that as preamble to this—even if there are such reasons to oppose things like property damage or intentional confrontation with police—as white supporters of Black Lives Matter, that is not our concern. And more often than not, what is lying underneath such arguments is actually discomfort with a perceived threat to the order of things.

To kind of overemphasize this part, I’m not out here saying hooray everyone protesting police brutality is throwing bricks and I think that’s awesome. But what I am saying is that I am far more concerned about racist police violence, lives threatened and lost as a result, and a system designed to encourage and absolve that violence. Beyond doing everything I can to help stop that, I have to accept that this will not be resolved without serious disruption.

I’m reminded of a 2010 paper by Barbara Masters and Torie Osborn about how a stodgy institution like philanthropy can support social movements that I also find valuable in understanding how someone in a position of privilege can be supportive of social change. “Because movements, by definition, must be driven by the people who are most affected, foundations cannot determine the goals and timetables of a movement.”

I think sometimes when people say things like they only support peaceful protestors, they are picturing people doing pretty much nothing. Maybe being quiet somewhere in large numbers but not too large. And then a different set of violent protestors maybe swoop in after they go home. But just as movements can be a kind of paradise “where souls get made,” they can also be chaotic, messy things. When you decide to support one, especially as a person whose life is not directly on the line, you just don’t get to prescribe how it goes or what it looks like.

I know, hopefully at least, we are all out here trying to do our best, and I think it’s OK for anyone to be stressed, anxious, uncomfortable. But instead of worrying about property damage and fires, white people would be better off removing ourselves from the role of critic, putting ourselves in the spaces where these struggles are happening, listening and learning.

Below is a post from a friend of mine Jason who has an independent comic book store in Downtown Portland. I thought it was a very insightful sentiment on this topic and I suspect a lot of small business owners have similar feelings.

Links

Podcasts

This is more like a poetry corner entry instead of a podcast entry but every once in a while a poem from The Slowdown makes me stop in my tracks and this week it was “supply and demand,” by Evie Shockley. Shockley lists common idioms about money, but replacing the word money with “black boys” as a way to illustrate the commodification of Black lives. You can read and listen here.

Comics

Swamp Thing vol. 6. I just love this series sad to be on the last installment of the Alan Moore run. This is an animal made out of water.

Listening

Orville Peck, Dead of Night

I Endorse

Giving money to Black-led groups working for racial justice and opposing police violence. I work at a philanthropy and nonprofit news site so I think about and recommend this kind of thing a lot I guess but if you want to do something, there are 100% organizations in your community working toward these goals and they 100% are under-resourced.

There are also limits to giving money as activism but it is pretty much always a good first or second or third move. There are a lot of other forms of showing up that are not for everyone (especially during a pandemic), but there are things anyone can do and donating is one of them.

I usually recommend that small donors give locally because that way it can also serve as an entry point to following what groups are doing in your own community and getting involved throughout the year if you can. We just made a round to Mass Action Against Police Brutality and Violence in Boston, and a couple others.

An enormous vigil in Franklin Park on Tuesday.

Well another week, another year’s worth of new developments. I hope you are getting enough sleep. Things are certainly speeding up aren’t they. Remember when stupid ass Plandemic was a thing yeah that was like 10 years ago it must have been, no it was just two weeks ago huh ok.

One thing about this newsletter when I started it was that it was always going to be about whatever was on my mind at the end of the week and climate change is generally the leading issue. But it’s also just about the rough state of the world and living in it and the good things and bad things that happen and how it all plays out in our lives. And now there have been at least two historic moments back to back or I guess on top of each other this year. But I think it’s increasingly clear to most of us that all of these issues are kind of the same issue if you know what I mean. I’m going to keep thinking and writing about that. Just trying to figure some things out over here.

Hang in there, hold on to something like when Indiana Jones was on that bridge and wrapped that piece of rope around his wrist because this thing is going down.

Tate

38: Reacting to a violent system

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‘A lot of folks are tired of that. They’re not going to take it anymore.’

March to the BPD station today

This is going to be short because we decided to go to a rally and march this evening organized by Mass Action Against Police Brutality. It is hard to know whether to do anything these days but we ultimately decided it was important to go. My friend Swedlund refers to this kind of decision we all have to regularly make these days as a Catch 2020.

This has been a tough week for people. I’m not exactly sure what to say and I’m also mindful of what is needed and not needed of me right now so I’m going to use this space to share some of the best things I’ve read by other people recently, about the most recent rash of state violence against Black people, and this topic more broadly.

…

Of Course There Are Protests. The State Is Failing Black People, by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

If there were ever questions about whether poor and working-class African-Americans were disposable, there can be none now. It’s clear that state violence is not solely the preserve of the police. …

The convergence of these tragic events — a pandemic disproportionately killing black people, the failure of the state to protect black people and the preying on black people by the police — has confirmed what most of us already know: If we and those who stand with us do not mobilize in our own defense, then no official entity ever will. Young black people must endure the contusions caused by rubber bullets or the acrid burn of tear gas because government has abandoned us. Black Lives Matter only because we will make it so.

…

The Death of George Floyd, In Context, by Jelani Cobb

The video of Floyd’s death is horrific but not surprising; terrible but not unusual, depicting a kind of incident that is periodically reenacted in the United States. It’s both necessary and, at this point, pedestrian to observe that policing in this country is mediated by race. …

There is more to be said about the burgeoning genre of videos capturing the deaths of black Americans, and the complex combination of revulsion and compulsion that accompanies their viewing. They are the macabre documentary of current events, but the question remains about whether they do more to humanize or to objectify the unwilling figures at the center of their narratives. Death is too intimate a phenomenon to not be distorted by a mass audience. Yesterday, very few of us knew who George Floyd was, what he cared about, how he lived his life. Today, we know him no better save for the grim way in which that life met its end.

…

The Toxic Intersection of Racism and Public Space, by Brentin Mock

The Jane Jacobian idea of “eyes on the street” very easily becomes “eyes on the black people” — which is why some African Americans disengage from public spaces like parks altogether. These peaceful green spaces just as easily induce anxiety and trauma for black and brown people, especially when they know the cops can be unleashed at any moment.

White people can weaponize the police against people who aren’t white, and that power only flows in one direction. The way Amy Cooper reacted in the video shows that she was aware of that power dynamic. All it took was for a white person to send a bat signal — or in Amy Cooper’s case, a racial dog whistle — to make a garden unsafe for a black person.

…

From Chaotic Minneapolis protests spread amid emotional calls for justice, peace

“There are folks reacting to a violent system,” [Michael McDowell, founder of Black Lives Matter Minneapolis] said. “You can replace property, you can replace businesses, you can replace material things, but you can’t replace a life. That man is gone forever because some cop felt like he had the right to take his life. A lot of folks are tired of that. They’re not going to take it anymore.”

That’s why, he said, “Minneapolis is burning.”

…

“I don’t think that folks are being anywhere as violent as the system has been toward them,” he said.

…

People Can Only Bear So Much Injustice Before Lashing Out, by Elie Mystal

The fact that most black people do not pick up the rock in that situation is a miracle. The fact that the overwhelming majority of black people respond to the violence and terrorism practiced against us with words and songs instead of rocks and bricks is altogether supernatural. …

This country could be on fire almost every night in almost every city. It’s not, because most black people in this country choose to exercise tremendous restraint. Most black people are still willing to talk this out. Most black people have the courage and fortitude to withstand the violence done against us without lowering ourselves to the level of an American police officer.

America should be more thankful for that. And it should remember that it’s a choice.

…

Breonna Taylor Was Murdered for Sleeping While Black, by Elie Mystal

[Breonna] Taylor’s death is a routine way for black people to die in this country, because the country long ago decided that murdering black people is a legal thing for cops to do. Taylor’s death wasn’t a tragic accident; it was the predictable result of a system that does not value black lives.

Almost every major institutional actor in this country chooses to let the cops get away with murder. The media makes this choice every time it decides to reprint a police report, uncritically, as if the cops can be trusted to represent the truth. Judges make this choice when they sign open-ended search warrants or retroactively admit evidence obtained without a warrant. Mayors and governors make this choice when they seek the endorsement of police unions and bend over backward to keep those unions happy. And prosecutors, juries, and justices make this choice when they refuse to hold cops criminally or financially accountable for their crimes.

…

Yes, Black America Fears the Police. Here’s Why., by Nikole Hannah-Jones

For those of you reading this who may not be black, or perhaps Latino, this is my chance to tell you that a substantial portion of your fellow citizens in the United States of America have little expectation of being treated fairly by the law or receiving justice. It’s possible this will come as a surprise to you. But to a very real extent, you have grown up in a different country than I have.

As Khalil Gibran Muhammad, author of The Condemnation of Blackness, puts it, “White people, by and large, do not know what it is like to be occupied by a police force. They don’t understand it because it is not the type of policing they experience. Because they are treated like individuals, they believe that if ‘I am not breaking the law, I will never be abused.’”

We are not criminals because we are black. Nor are we somehow the only people in America who don’t want to live in safe neighborhoods. Yet many of us cannot fundamentally trust the people who are charged with keeping us and our communities safe.

…

‘I Do It To Survive’: Being Black In America Means Adapting To Constant Risk, by Theresa Okokon

I cannot accept that George Floyd was killed mere minutes from where my family lives, where my niece and nephews could have witnessed it. It messes me up to see images of so many people in the street, risking their lives and their bodies still unadapted to the coronavirus, forced to protest. I do not accept the message of protection and service emblazoned on the side of cop cars, when the men who exit those vehicles murder us. We are not safe. We cannot go for a jog. We cannot be in our own homes. We cannot go bird watching. 

…

From How Tear Gas Works: A Rundown of the Chemicals Used on Crowds

“I think of tear gas as a pain gas,” he says. “Because it directly activates pain-sensing receptors.” [says Sven-Eric Jordt, an anesthesiologist at Duke University.] …

Given the risk of injury or damage, [Rohini Haar, a doctor with Physicians for Human Rights and a public health scientist at the University of California, Berkeley,] says that there are almost no scenarios where the use of tear gas makes sense for controlling crowds. “I can see very few discrete situations where there might be a direct need for tear gas to protect public safety,” she says. “One thing we see more and more now is tear gas causing panic, disorder and chaos. There’s mass deaths from stampedes because tear gas was used.” 

…

From Jamelle Bouie’s newsletter:

…it is impossible not to note the contrast in how the Minneapolis protesters have been treated compared with armed demonstrators protesting lockdowns in Michigan and other states. I wrote earlier this month about how the idea of “freedom” is shaped by race and racism. Here, we have a perfect example of exactly that: how the perceived legitimacy of protest and dissent is shaped by who is doing the protesting. Screaming, gun-toting white people can demonstrate with little resistance. Mourning black people, on the other hand, are liable to face state violence.

…

Finally if you are angry and want to do something, you can give to these groups:

Or find a racial justice group in your own community also don’t call the police and also educate yourself about how to be anti-racist because none of us are free until all of us are free.

More Links

  • More than 80 nursing homes in Massachusetts have 20 or more Covid-19 deaths. That’s one out of every five facilities.
  • The Navajo Nation wants to use half of its federal Covid-19 relief funds on clean water projects, as 30 to 40% of its households lack running water. That could be blocked under restrictions in the CARES Act.
  • Coronavirus is a “sliding doors” moment that could change the trajectory of our carbon emissions. Really into that Gwyneth reference.
  • What Were Sports?
  • Among ill-advised re-openings, a risk assessment of summer activities. Haircut? Medium to high risk!
  • “Indie folk” is kind of a cringey genre name, but this newly updated list is a real gold mine.
  • An oral history of Punky Brewster and the horrifying episode where Cherie locks herself inside of a refrigerator.
  • Artist, cook, and food writer Tunde Wey has some words for a problematic restaurant industry as the tailspin continues: “Let it die.” (Definitely read this one.)

Listening

Jamie got me an iPod for my birthday because I have this huge collection of mp3s that I haven’t really listened to in years. So I loaded it up and have been playing a lot of older music that had kind of fallen off my radar. One example is Gentlemen by The Afghan Whigs. Forgot about this beautiful slow burn with vocals by fellow Columbus musician Marcy Mays.

Watching

I am watching Riverdale right now and honestly I don’t want to talk about it that is embarrassing.

I Endorse

Enjoying a nice breeze coming in through a window.

One of my favorite writers is Simon, who is the 8-year-old son of my two close friends who live in Cambodia. I previously posted his reinterpretation of Mama Mia Papa Pia, and he is also known for a powerful personal essay on what everyone in the house was doing one day. His latest is probably his best work yet, a poem that he was kind enough to allow me to publish here:

Keep these words in mind. You are safe. You can’t go farther than the tide.

Tate

37: Shouting from the rooftops

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When people show up, you don’t have to compromise

The Zoological journal. London: W. Phillips, 1824

If you know the name Erica Chenoweth, it’s probably in relation to the Harvard professor’s widely cited “3.5% rule,” which poses that no government can withstand a challenge from 3.5% or more of its population without accommodating it or in extreme cases falling to it. This is an alluring figure, and one that has been embraced by climate activists among many others. So has research by Chenoweth and Maria J. Stephan that found nonviolent resistance campaigns were twice as likely to achieve success as violent campaigns.

That last conclusion comes from their book Why Civil Resistance Works, which I finished earlier this year just as we started to really get into the shit so I didn’t talk about it much at the time. But it’s a pretty remarkable book and I’ve mentioned it here and there but figured I would revisit it now because reviewing a seven year old book two months after I finished it is a solid CP move.

The top line conclusions from the book are important—studying over a century of resistance campaigns the authors found that sometimes nonviolence works, sometimes violence works, but nonviolence works way more often. One big reason is that it’s easier to get to that critical % of participation when you don’t have to recruit people to commit violent acts. Another big finding is that nonviolent campaigns more often result in democratic, stable outcomes.

So that’s really something, but my favorite parts of the book were its case studies of resistance campaigns that succeeded, failed, or partially succeeded and partially failed, and what we can learn from them. So even more useful than the conclusion of “nonviolent campaigns of a certain size succeed” are the details of how different movements reach that threshold, and why sometimes they fail anyway. For example, one critical quality other than sheer size is diversity of participants and tactics. Successful movements are non-monolithic.

The most interesting of the case studies is probably the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This is obviously a big, complicated story, but one of the main factors Chenoweth cites in the success of this revolution is that there was a huge diversity of participants, which made it bigger and more varied in its tactics, and more difficult for the regime to repress. The obvious faction involved was the powerful religious leaders who ultimately seized control in the aftermath and ended up forming another violent, oppressive government. For that reason, the revolution is sometimes characterized as a failure.

But the movement 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 fact, the majority of the people who participated in the revolution never actually clashed with the regime. One hallmark was people staying home and shouting anti-Shah slogans from their rooftops at night. It was a movement where anybody could do something.

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.

Of course, the shadow of this particular nonviolent resistance is its violent aftermath, what Chenoweth and Stephan call an anomaly in their conclusion that nonviolent campaigns more often lead to peaceful results. For a bunch of reasons, radical clerics ended up having too much power within the coalition and locked everyone else out. The authors pose a couple of explanations for this. First, while its uncompromising goal was to remove the Shah, different factions sought different things and the movement never coalesced around a shared vision of a post-Shah Iran. They also suggest that the secular leftist guerrilla movement provided an excuse for the religious regime to stamp out other secular voices.

So there seem to be two potential dangers here, one being a movement perhaps too ecumenical to form a shared vision. Another in the way that one faction isolating itself by being too rigid in both politics and tactics can be destructive, even setting aside the moral question of resorting to violence.

But for me, the biggest takeaway is just how important it is for campaigns to make it easy for anyone to participate, on some level. You need the people who are the most dedicated, with the savviest politics, who are sacrificing the most, but if that’s all you have, you won’t get to that unstoppable critical mass. Activists tend to emphasize certain kinds of hard or risky work, but different people will have different things to offer a successful movement. That includes the people sitting in and getting arrested and the people just shouting from rooftops to signal their approval. In the contemporary pro-choice movement in Argentina, for example, the performative symbol of just wearing the color green has become a source of real power.

There is this anecdote from another book I have talked about before, Towards Collective Liberation, which makes a related observation in a case study of the Rural Organizing Project in Oregon, which does working-class organizing around immigrant rights through a series of “living room conversations.”

While we want everyone to be an active leader in the struggle for racial justice, we know that is not going to happen immediately. Think of our work as concentric circles. The first circle is ROP board members and staff. The second circle is the leadership of local groups. The third circle is the membership of local groups. The final circle is the broader community that our local groups operate in. When we have a Living Room Conversation, we are essentially taking a slice of this pie with representation from each of these circles. While we would love to have everyone join as a member of the [Immigration Fairness Network], at a minimum we want everyone in the room to not join the Minutemen.

Links

  • A third of the US population could end up experiencing one or more extreme weather events annually, including fun things like “flash drought” and quick-forming extreme thunderstorms.
  • If the US had started social distancing one week earlier we could have saved 36,000 lives, one model of the disease found. Two weeks earlier and 83% of deaths could have been avoided.
  • The patchwork nature of the country’s response—and of our social safety net—will make the coronavirus difficult to get under control because instead of a clear peak and decline it’s just going to go up and down all over the place and nobody will agree on what to do.
  • Hundreds of workers in Massachusetts have filed complaints with OSHA about unsafe working conditions during the pandemic and OSHA doesn’t seem to give much of a shit.
  • The opening Listerine anecdote from this Jason Isbell profile alone is a must read.
  • A Quality Inn in Revere has been turned into a quarantine hotel for patients with coronavirus who can’t stay at home.
  • Death Angel’s drummer said his COVID-19 coma was like being in hell tortured by Satan. “I’m still going to listen to satanic metal [but] I don’t think Satan’s quite as cool as I used to.” Not going to lie folks this is probably the one to click this week.

This is a headline I saw. Strange times.

Watching

I’ve been watching HBO’s The Leftovers which is a show all about grief and Justin Theroux’s chiseled torso. I never see that guy working out in the show though he is mostly hallucinating or punching walls but I guess that burns calories. I am 50% through the series and I like it. It has this sort of slow, relentless sadness and randomness to it that feels a lot like life can sometimes. I will say that unlike Lindelof’s Watchmen, there is still a little Lost stink on this show, like it’s meant to be an ABC primetime drama but they threw a Max Richter score behind it and slapped it up on prestige cable. Anyway, another glowing review from me, but it’s a good show really four stars check it out.

This is me discussing my summer plans.

Reading

I recently finished Sloane Crosley’s Look Alive Out There and she is very funny and insightful and it was also nice to read little stories about non-quarantine life. One standout essay is about when she unwittingly tried to climb one of the most treacherous mountains in Ecuador without any preparation whatsoever.

The constant state of newness in a foreign country lends a little drama to everything. Even the maiden operation of a local ATM demands problem-solving. It becomes increasingly difficult to parse personal adventure from objective adventure, until you’re certain everything should be a challenge, every path a learning curve. It is only later that someone native to the region hears you decided to ride a bicycle to the airport, laughs, and says: Not that steep of a curve.

Listening

New Jason Isbell.

Some of the things that we have ordered online include a lot of books, some fancy glassware because if you have to drink at home it might as well be classy. And the biggest item is a credenza, a piece of furniture we have desperately needed for the office for like four years but never wanted to buy.

It arrived on Tuesday unassembled in a 160 pound box for which the delivery guy was like I know I am essential but come on screw you guys. The box was on our porch all day because it was too heavy to move and we had nowhere to put it until the night when I hacked the giant thing open with a knife and brought it in piece by piece like the goddamn London Bridge. Wikipedia tells me it took over three years to put the London Bridge back together in Lake Havasu City and that is how long it will take me to put together this credenza.

Have a nice weekend everyone. Get some sun but jesus do not touch anything.

Tate

36: Turn the soil

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People buying stuff near constantly and when they stop for even a few weeks things start to crumble

Still Life with a Golden Goblet, Pieter de Ring, 1635-1650

It really struck me just how fragile capitalism is, in this particular go round of economic meltdown at least, when the Cheesecake Factory went on a rent strike. Here you had a company with 294 restaurants and some 40,000 employees, with a time-honored, 50-year legacy of stuffing carbohydrates into people, and on March 23—like two weeks into the pandemic—the company told its landlords well we are sorry but we cannot pay our rent, extenuating circumstances, you understand. Because, they explained, our entire existence is predicated on people constantly eating cheesecake and if there is a break in that eating of cheesecake for a mere two weeks we basically have zero money and can’t even keep these lights on.

The company laid off thousands of workers who then were presumably unable to pay their own rents (we know from all the folk songs what happens to a town when the local factory closes down). Those employees—many likely immigrants ineligible for government aid—had far fewer backup options than the Cheesecake Factory, which ended up having a $90 million line of credit and then a $200 million capital investment that showed up after the news spread. So who knows how dire the company’s situation ever really was, at the risk of questioning the integrity of the Cheesecake Factory.

But the whole affair illustrates rather well the unending need for a massive churn of spending, lest the wheels come off of this entire operation, that is so chilling during times of economic downturn. For all the talk of the power of the American economy, it makes you wonder how sturdy of a system we created when it is based on people just buying stuff near constantly and then when they have to stop for even a few weeks, things start to crumble.

Aside from the resulting precarity for workers, it does feel like a lot of this stuff that evaporates when spending grinds to a halt was maybe not necessary in the first place, because otherwise I don’t know that we’d really need a $1.7 trillion marketing industry. But the mass closure of businesses is unfortunately about much more than the loss of a mall restaurant that a coastal elite like me can so easily, and let’s be honest, cheaply ridicule. Because when the mechanisms that keep our institutions going turn out to be quite delicate, it also means we just as quickly lose some of our most precious community resources.

Where I live in the Roslindale neighborhood of Boston, we’re experiencing this in our own business district, as is pretty much every community. Roslindale Village had become this thriving little center with some of the best restaurants in the city, a small independent grocery store, cute little shops. Recently a coffee shop/bar combo opened up that had become a bustling, essential meeting place for local politics, nonprofits, teachers, artists, and on any given day you’d hear at least three languages spoken at its tables. The community fought hard since the 90s to turn the square around—with the help of government grants—and has benefited from both local volunteering and crowdfunded improvement projects.

But right now, over half the businesses there have at least temporarily closed their doors, with some essential stores and restaurant takeout keeping the pulse going. Like a lot of main street business associations, ours has been running fundraisers, providing financial assistance to its struggling members. But who knows which businesses are going to survive. For all of the country’s professed adoration of the scrappy small business, we don’t seem to be doing a very good job of supporting them, with some 100,000 of them closing for good since the pandemic began.

There are some heartening local success stories. Down the road in Jamaica Plain, a beloved independent, feminist bookstore called Papercuts, which hosts readings and events and runs its own small press, raised nearly $60,000 to help cover its costs, which residents were more than happy to donate.

But not every neighborhood is so fortunate to have that kind of private wealth that it can donate to sustain its institutions. Columnist Jeneé Osterheldt recently reported for the Globe that the relatively small number of Black-owned restaurants in the city are facing imminent shutdown. Government relief is notoriously difficult to secure for any business, and those owned by immigrants, Black people, and other people of color struggle to secure loans, liquor licenses, and contracts even absent a health crisis or recession. As Osterheldt points out, these are more than just places where people buy things. They host events to celebrate the community’s teachers, hold gatherings for professionals of color, organize food banks to feed the homeless. “This is often where Black Boston builds, networks, and thrives.”

I think everyone has felt the weight of the loss of such institutions in their own communities, even if it’s just the closure of a local bar. We can feel in our bones that it’s more than one owner’s personal financial enterprise going away, that lots of people have built it into more than a place where money can be exchanged for goods and services.

Two Irish bars in Jamaica Plain have closed in recent years for financial reasons, and both were home to long traditions of community and political organizing. When it was announced this month that after 44 years, bar and rock club Great Scott could not cover its rent, the punk community and young people in general (and also not so young people ahem) were devastated that this scene staple was going away, but you know, too bad so sad.

A slightly different, but trust me it is related example, the comics industry has come to rely on a single distribution company, Diamond, which effectively operates as a monopoly. When it abruptly halted operations it sent an entire creative field into a tailspin. The entire news media is a macro example of something we’ve all come to rely on that lives and dies based on an ill-fitting profit-seeking model.

I guess what I’m getting at is that, though consumer cash flow allowed all of these institutions to take root, it just seems deeply wrong to me that something as fickle as that can bring them to their knees, sometimes after decades, in a matter of months or weeks. We have to be able to do better than this, and the compounding crises of the era, especially, demand it.

One of my favorite things I ever covered was this organization serving Boston’s neighborhoods of color, called the Boston Ujima Project, which is kind of hard to summarize succinctly, but I tried to do it already so here, this is what I said:

At its core, Ujima is a place-based investment fund, controlled democratically by community members to support businesses, real estate and infrastructure projects that would otherwise struggle to find financing. It also layers philanthropy with other forms of capital to mitigate risk and to make it easier for working-class and local people to invest in the fund themselves. Beyond investing, Ujima organizes the community in support of its projects and other social justice campaigns.

So a bunch of people in the neighborhood get together in a big room and collectively hear proposals for businesses that will serve the community, and decide what to back. It completely upends the risks and incentives of most investment capital in order to fund projects that would otherwise struggle to get off the ground and then stay open, and acts as an organizing platform for broader change.

“I think we’re trying to propose what a new economy could look like,” Lucas Turner-Owens, fund manager for Boston Ujima Project told me at the time. But you should really go read it not just because it is my article but because it is a fascinating undertaking that has become a model for other others like it popping up elsewhere.

I think folks at places like the Ujima Project would be the first to tell you they don’t have this all figured out, but they are trying to imagine a better system, stealing fragments of an old one we know is broken. I particularly like something adrienne maree brown wrote on this topic in her book Emergent Strategy so here it is for the big finish:

I like this visual of turning and evolving, as opposed to destroying the systems in place now. When Wheatley visited Detroit on a learning journey, she said systems built on greed eventually collapse on themselves, topple under their own top-heavy weight. Matter doesn’t disappear, it transforms. Energy is the same way. The Earth is layer upon layer of all that has existed, remembered by the dirt. It is time to turn capitalism into a fossil, time to turn the soil, turn to the horizon together.

Links

This is you on weeks when you don’t get this newsletter.

Listening

Angelica Garcia is my new favorite.

F it let’s do another one

Jamie and I are both big podcast listeners and we used to do this fake weekly podcast by ourselves with no recording or audience that we called “Good Eps” in which we discussed our favorite podcast episodes from the week. On Fridays usually, it would always start, so you heard any good eps lately? And then we talk about podcast episodes. I guess when you think about it, two people talking and listening to each other talk is the purest distillation of the podcast medium. Honestly, we’ve had some pretty good eps of that show.

Now that as a couple we are never, ever apart, we still walk around the house sometimes with our separate earbuds in, listening to our podcasts, because our small but loyal audience demands that Good Eps continue even during these challenging times.

But you know what my favorite podcast is? Your podcast. Even if you don’t have one. If you had one, it would be my favorite. Keep those eps coming.

Tate

35: The Jackpot

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Living on the brink of oil stained societal collapse, everything going wrong in 20 different directions

Zebra and Parachute 1930 Christopher Wood 1901-1930 Accepted by HM Government in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to Tate 2004 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T12038

Christopher Wood, Zebra and Parachute, 1930, © Tate, CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0

I’m going to write about William Gibson today, for the second time in this newsletter, because while he is best known for a book from the 1980s that sort of predicted the internet, his unique perspectives on time, technology, and inequality feel more relevant to me than they have in years. In particular, his 2014 novel The Peripheral takes his famous premise that “the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed,” to its extreme conclusion in an era of accelerating ecological disaster.

(conceptual, if not plot spoilers, ahead)

Specifically, it envisions a distant future in which a small aristocratic percentage of the population survives—relying on technology that surged forward during a global crisis—while the remaining 80% of the population is, I regret to inform you, extremely dead.

For some reason, I tend to set aside new books by my favorite authors, but his latest Agency just came out as a sort of sequel to The Peripheral so I figured I better catch up. He’s one of my favorite writers, and ever since I started reading him as a teen, his anti-corporate, fascinated-but-frightened brand of scifi has been kind of a touchstone. While some of his early tropes have long been cliche (who’s ready to jack into cyberspace) his later work took on a more muted, meditative tone, densely packed with ideas about social strata, anxiety and drug use, militarism in the private sector and daily life, and weirdly enough, fashion.

For starters I will disclose that, predictably, I loved this book, even though and I could be wrong here, I got a sense that it was not among his most beloved novels. I probably wouldn’t recommend it as an entry point as it’s long, pretty dense, and deliberately disorienting in a way that can make you kind of queasy. Five stars put that on a book jacket. But especially the first third of the book or so is incredibly well crafted. One thing I’ve always loved about Gibson’s prose is that you have to read it almost the way you read poetry. Not due to any actual verse or other affectations; his sentences are very sparse, holding quiet or even silent details that you can easily miss if you’re not paying attention.

It’s particularly hard to sort out what’s going in this one because, and this is not spelled out for some time, it takes place in two different timelines in which characters end up interacting with each other as a result of some scifi thingies. So I believe one set of characters is in the 2040s in rural Alabama, and the other is living 70 years later in London. The first setting is this kind of high tech trailer trash world of extreme gig economy, poverty, sickness, combat injury, PTSD. Smartphones and septic tanks. The latter is all gleaming post-scarcity, high rise towers in a regreened London that’s flowing with resurfaced rivers. It’s a hell of its own, though, actually far worse than the earlier timeline—a cold and tedious society stripped of its social contracts, democracy having been eradicated, and all affairs now managed via kleptocracy in which wealthy families and corporations jockey for power using a combination of algorithms and violence.

Separating the two eras is an intersectional, human-caused global meltdown known as “The Jackpot,” which we learn halfway into the book killed off 80% of humanity and an unspecified majority of other animal species over the span of about 40 years. It didn’t happen all at once, but gradually,

no comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate; droughts, water shortages, crop failures…every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. And all of it around people: how people were, how many of them there were, how they’d changed things just by being there.

Keep in mind, this was published in 2014, presumably started at least a couple years prior. But Gibson always bristles at being tagged as prescient, because he always says in writing about the future that he’s really writing about the present. I think about this a lot in relation to Octavia Butler’s Parable series, dystopian books written in the 1990s that many people are pointing out right now were devastatingly accurate. When I first read those books it occured to me that, when fictional dystopian futures seem to come true, it’s not because they predicted the future, rather, it’s because on some level, the worst aspects of humanity just never change.

So in writing about the two eras, Gibson seems to be reflecting on how we are living in both of them today, simultaneously, although neither fully established or pervasive, and running at far quieter volumes. On one hand, it can feel like we’re living on the brink of oil stained societal collapse, everything seeming to be going wrong in 20 different directions. On the other, it feels like we’ve arrived in an advanced future that moves at light speed, but one run on perpetual surveillance, self-dealing corruption, and an ever out of reach ruling class.

Gibson’s work is almost always anti-corporate, if not full on anti-capitalist, but it’s also never explicitly prescriptive. He writes about technology and has a clear fondness for it, but more as a quirk of human evolution than either a root source or a fix for our social ills. So while The Peripheral has a superficially happy ending, it’s not entirely clear what the solutions are to his imagined anthropocenic collapse. I bet some people reading found that frustrating, the lack of a clear assault on tech, opting instead for a melancholy acceptance that it’s always there, always changing, and very often harnessed by a boring flavor of evil, what he calls “the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.”

That’s one of the most fascinating things about The Peripheral, and one of the reasons I wanted to write about it here. It doesn’t depict a collapsed future in which everything has gone wrong and everything is bad. In fact, it appears they did fix many of the problems of The Jackpot. Humanity figured it out. We entered a new era of coexistence with the planet. But we were far too late, and it cost us everything.

There is a certain view out there that humanity always figures it out, always innovates its way out of our problems. Whether it’s Covid-19 or the next pandemic or the climate crisis, we adapt, solve the thing at hand, and move on to the next thing, too clever and adaptable to go extinct. And to some extent, our problems and solutions are those of innovation. But when activists use extinction as a frame, the stakes being presented are not necessarily the literal eradication of the species. It’s the potential loss of entire ways of life, biodiversity, entire cultures, demographics (folks of a certain vulnerable age, say), widespread suffering and death that is just as intolerable as extinction.

I have to imagine people who fixate only on developing new technological solutions to problems like climate change really do believe those solutions will lift up all of humanity, and they usually make that very argument. But it’s telling that it’s often people who would very likely be in the 20% who would survive Gibson’s Jackpot. Which makes me think their confidence that we’ll be OK and figure this out is actually confidence that we’ll be OK and figure this out. And that’s not good enough.

As Gibson points out, the price of our survival may well be a world in which we lose our collective decision-making, abandon our sense of morality and justice, and accept a harder, colder world. And most notably, that’s a world in which many if not most are left in the wreckage as technology marches on.

‘It is a sewer’

I was off last week but I had a couple of thoughts about that Michael Moore documentary on climate change that came out, which I will never ever watch fyi. I suspect there is some schadenfreude on the center-to-right surrounding Moore’s glorified YouTube conspiracy video, something like oh the left turns on itself how do they like it now. And I think there is always some suspicion that liberals are somehow hypnotized by Michael Moore and do whatever his movies say. So I just feel the need to say that I literally do not know a single person who has been a fan of Michael Moore for perhaps 20 years. The guy is an asshole.

Anyway the weirdest thing about that movie is that it seems to have these sort of theoretically worthwhile rough ideas like attacking corporate influence on environmentalism, you know a valid concern. But the targets he picks are just completely wrong. Saying renewables have the same climate impact as fossil fuels is asinine. And Moore’s movies always center on one big villain, and somehow he chose Bill McKibben. Honestly, I think McKibben’s particular flavor of environmentalism is overrepresented, but the guy has devoted his life to climate change and doesn’t have a corporate sellout bone in his body. Moore could have done something on the Nature Conservancy or the EDF or Walton, all these BINGOs that went all in on market solutions and corporate partnerships instead of regulation. But Bill McKibben? Like, it’s just actually wrong. Anyway, as McKibben himself put it quite nicely: the movie is a “sewer.” Don’t watch it, don’t believe it, and please don’t imagine that this is what liberals or progressives think about climate change. Goodbye!

Links

  • 81 workers at a Walmart in Worcester contracted the coronavirus. It was forcibly shut down by local health officials, mid-afternoon with shoppers still in the aisles.
  • Harvard won’t divest, and nobody knows what its plan to move toward a “net-zero endowment” means. The announcement trots out the case that they don’t want to “alienate or demonize” fossil fuel companies, a strategy that has accomplished worse than nothing for decades.
  • The Dutch government is taking fast, sweeping climate action, because they are being legally forced to (after resisting for five years). Let’s get a round of applause for the underappreciated approach of just legally fucking forcing things to change.
  • By 2070, one-third of the world’s population is likely to live in areas unsuitably hot for human life.
  • Lots of uh useful insights in this interview with Esther Perel on how to be a couple during quarantine.
  • Liquor store sales are way up (you’re welcome liquor stores) and hot items include 30 racks of Bud and half-gallon bottles of vodka.

Comics

This week I’m going to highlight an artist whose work I have loved for a while now and often provides some calming joy. Her name is Maggie Umber, and she is co-founder of the scrappy indie comics collective 2dcloud out of Minneapolis. 2dcloud has had some fits and starts over the years but they follow in the tradition of indie labels with a distinct ethic and I just love everything they put out they are really pushing the limits of comics.

Umber’s work is a great example, as much of it is painted, and while it is often sequential and has elements of text, there is rarely any dialogue, at least not in what I’ve read. I recommend Sound of Snow Falling, which is pitched as a “paint and paper documentary, observing great horned owls in their natural habitat.” When comics are really good, you can almost hear what is happening in them, and this is a beautiful example.

She’s also been doing these atmospheric spooky black and white comics that have been running in Now: New Comics Anthology, including one in Now 8 here is a panel:

You can buy a bunch of stuff right from 2dcloud and Now Anthologies from Fantagraphics so go do it.

Listening

Obviously I am listening to the new Fiona Apple but so are you so here is something different that would also make a nice pairing with the above pick: Charlie Haden and Antonio Forcione’s guitar and double bass duet, Heartplay. This has been humming in the background quite a lot in the apartment lately. Let’s go with the song Silence:

I Endorse

Arcosanti’s Instagram account. This account was shut down for a minute “due to unfortunate events” whatever that means lol but now it’s back. This is about the time of year I usually go back to Arizona to visit family and friends but that’s a big no go this year so I’ve been especially enjoying this virtual window into the experimental utopian architectural project in Northern Arizona, founded by famed visionary and megalomaniac Paolo Soleri. This was a popular field trip destination when I was in school and one time on the way home from one our van broke down and like 30 eighth graders were set loose to wander around the side of the highway in Arizona’s high desert for an afternoon it’s a fond memory. If you are in or from Arizona, you own a Soleri bell we have two.

Hey I really missed you all last week I took a few days off to sit in my living room in a different way than usual and it was mostly fine, like 60% as good taking days off in the before times. What have you guys been doing? Looks like mostly draining a bunch of Budweiser and Tito’s from what I’m reading in the news but that’s fine do what you gotta do.

One thing I did was I finally took the plunge and shaved my head but kept my beard the same so I basically look like I’m getting ready to storm a state capitol building in a tactical vest I ordered on Amazon. Jamie was nervous about helping and I said, look there is nothing you can do wrong, I’m shaving it all off. But then she was cleaning things up around the ears and left this huge square bald patch. She was like, oh no we had a good laugh.

Anyway gotta run I hope you are all OK and healthy and reasonably happy but then sometimes mad. You are going to be alright.

Tate

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