Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Rich Men and Their Misshapen Brains

Elon Musk

Watching the eagerness with which American billionaires have rushed to pay obeisance to President-Elect Donald Trump has been a real education. Not in the sense of realizing that America’s rich are venal—that’s hardly news. But the haste they show in showering Trump’s planned inauguration with money and other resources speaks volumes to what these men want. They’re pouring million-dollar investments into an inauguration that threatens to become a coronation.

I’ve often wondered what makes men (and it’s indeed mostly men) want that kind of money. Oligarchs like Zuckerberg, Musk, and Bezos have more money than they can possibly spend. And more than money: as Giblin and Doctorow write, half of Earth’s online advertising revenue flows through two companies, Alphabet (Google) and Meta (Facebook). Half of Earth’s online commercial transactions move, directly or indirectly, through Amazon or an affiliated company.

In other words, these monumentally rich oligarchs, some of whom command wealth exceeding the GDP of entire nations of the Global South, have not only money, but enough power to make medieval potentates blush. These financial superstars have become so powerful that, like real stars, their very presence bends time, space, and the value of a buck. Yet they pay homage to the political candidate who promises them ever more.

They cannot spend that kind of money. It cannot buy them any more comfort or security than they already have. Indeed, they need to employ cadres of guards, managers, and other functionaries to protect their wealth, making holding the money a financial burden on their bottom line. Paradoxically, having such money and power makes them poorer and more vulnerable. Therefore they must want something else, something non-monetary, from their investments.

Mark Zuckerberg

My mind returns to two prior authors I’ve reviewed. Hungarian-Canadian physician Gabor Maté writes that substance abuse patients choose their various addictions according to whatever traumas they suffered in childhood. Children who endured chronic physical abuse, become adults who abuse painkillers like alcohol. Maté writes that one heroin addict described the feeling of shooting up as receiving the warm hugs she never received as a child.

Business executive Joe Plumeri describes himself as a “workaholic,” whose social worth derives from his time spent working. In his memoir, Plumeri describes not only putting himself through punishing hours, but demanding his subordinates do likewise, sacrificing personal time, family, and sleep in favor of making money. Though a billionaire himself, Plumeri clocks less than one percent of Elon Musk’s wealth, too little to crack the Forbes 400 list.

The two most prominent relationships in Plumeri’s memoir are his father, and his son. In an early chapter, Plumeri describes his father showing him around the better-off neighborhoods of Trenton, New Jersey, showcasing the splendor available to those who achieve worldly success. By his own admission, Plumeri put everything else behind achieving the worldly success that, he learned early, would make his father proud.

That “everything” includes Plumeri’s relationship with his eldest son, whom Plumeri describes struggling with alcohol and drugs. Christian Plumeri destroyed himself on substances, seeking the validation and happiness that his distant, workaholic father couldn’t provide. Notably, he completely fails to notice the parallels between his own work addiction, and his son’s substance addiction. Both Plumeris wanted their father’s love, and couldn’t do enough to earn it.

Jeff Bezos

One wonders, reading these accounts, what comparable relationships men like Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos lack. Musk seeks extremes of wealth and political power, arguably to find the acceptance and love he increasingly doesn’t receive from his numerous children and ex-wives. Other billionaires hoard land, build spacecraft, and otherwise perform spectacles to receive adulation from shareholders and the public.

Because deep down, I propose, they’re lonely.

These men started off rich: Zuckerberg was a Harvard legacy admission. Bezos received seed capital from his parents. Musk has tried to bury the emerald mine story, but his own family confirms it. Given the crazed, excessive lengths they’ve travelled to become even richer, it seems likely that they, like Plumeri, inherited the myth of personal worth having a dollar value. They hoard resources because, basically, they need a hug.

Consider all they acclaim they’d receive by dedicating even a portion of their wealth to improving society. They have money enough to end famine, conquer homelessness, or halt global climate change. Instead, they’re donating millions to Donald Trump’s inaugural extravaganza. Because despite everything, their brains are already adapted to loneliness, rejection, and isolation. They’ll never make friends like ordinary humans.

And that’s why peons like me will never become rich.

Friday, January 10, 2025

Horror, Romance, and the Wrong Kind of Love

H.D. Carlton, Haunting Adeline: Cat & Mouse Duet, Book 1

Adeline Reilly has just inherited her grandmother's old house, a Victorian-style manor knockoff overlooking the Washington coast. The house might be cursed; Addie certainly thinks it resembles a horror movie set, but that doesn’t discourage her from moving in and updating the interior. But somebody else has noticed Addie’s arrival. A nameless hacker, vigilante, and apparent superhuman begins stalking her, entering her house silently and with apparent impunity.

I became interested in this novel because author H.D. Carlton became a runaway bestseller without backing from a Big-Five publisher. Maybe, I thought, she tapped some unrecognized reservoir of readership the algorithm-driven mainstreamers ignored. Having read this one, I suspect that her magic must be her willingness to air Freudian linen, because I don’t recall a more bog-standard psychological tapestry recently outside an undergraduate psych textbook.

Like Carlton, Addie is an independent novelist, and therefore has remarkable time liberty. She apparently has freedom to supervise the professional restoration of Parsons Manor, while also having lunch dates with her best friend, and live author appearances. Despite her freedom, though, she has no ability to supervise her house, so her stalker has an unimpeded ability to enter, leave flowers and letters, raid her liquor cabinet, and escape unseen.

And what a stalker. He has time enough to haunt Addie’s romantic life, including torturing and humiliating her dates. But he moonlights as a vigilante, hunting a national human trafficking network. This secondary plot is tonally inconsistent with the Gothic main plot, resembling an unsold Hollywood treatment. He’s also able to follow Addie from the city to her isolated country house, commit crimes, and destroy the evidence, remaining constantly invisible.

Adeline’s support network apparently consists of two people: her mother and her best friend. Daya, her best friend, has one role: try to get Addie laid. That’s her response to everything. Excessively ambitious house restoration project? Let’s get drunk and laid. Stalker somehow entering Addie’s locked house and leaving tokens? Let’s get drunk and laid. Describing Daya as Adeline’s Freudian id is, frankly, generous.

Her mother, therefore, is her Freudian superego. She exists to warn Addie against anything risky, chaotic, or fun. She appears when necessary to provide dire, sepulchral exposition, and to urge Addie to assume more socially acceptable adult responsibilities. At one key juncture, she drives an hour to give Addie a warning she could’ve conveyed in a text message, because fundamentally, she isn’t a rounded person, she’s a narrative device.

H.D. Carlton

If we understand Addie’s supporting cast in Freudian terms, then her nameless stalker represents both Eros and Thanos. He selects Addie entirely because she’s beautiful, which he expounds in lush detail. But, without speaking to her (or reading her prose) he declares himself “addicted” to her. Then he proclaims: “All I want is to break her. Shatter her into pieces. And then arrange those pieces to fit against my own.”

Yikes.

Carlton manipulates the story to ensure that Addie’s stalker remains, for narrative purposes, blameless. Sure, he’s a violent torturer, but it’s okay, because the people he hurts are QAnon-style human traffickers. Sure, he captures and murders any man Addie attempts to hook up with, but it’s okay, because she brings home abusers and criminals who deserve being hurt. Violence winds up being protective, nurturing, even benevolent. Brutality as romantic desire.

Okay, this character is an unrefined fantasy of male domination. Some women find violence the ultimate expression of masculinity; I’m reminded of the women who sent Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, love letters during his decades of incarceration. I can only imagine the women who entertain these fantasies haven’t survived an abusive relationship, because this character isn’t sexy, nor even particularly frightening; he’s just disgusting.

Yet Addie romanticizes him, finding parallels with her great-grandmother’s juicy personal diaries. Like Addie, Genevieve Parsons had an enigmatic admirer who haunted the margins of her forested Gothic gingerbread house. We await how these two stories will converge. But until they do, Addie increasingly sees her violent stalker as a dangerous boyfriend like her great-nana’s dangerous, shadowy love. She sees both as frightening and titillating.

Takes all kinds, I guess.

This glorification of violence, as an expression of love, frightens me. Not in the good frightening way that draws audiences back to horror literature and novels, I understand that. Rather, this novel elevates violence as romantic desire, repeating the myth that, if he loves you, he’ll hurt any rivals and dominate your time. I suppose this might seem erotic and exciting, if you haven’t been through it.

Monday, January 6, 2025

The Rise and Fall of Anti-Democracy, Part Two

This is a re-review of a prior book. The original review appears at The Rise and Fall of Anti-Democracy.

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point

When Levitsky and Ziblatt published this book in 2023, it seemed reasonable to discuss the Trump Administration in the past tense. The once and future President lost his midterm election overwhelmingly, then became the first sitting president to lose his reelection bid in nearly thirty years. He left office with the lowest approval rating in polling history. Although Trump retained a loyal following, reasonable observers and political pundits assumed history had passed its final judgment.

The forces Levitsky and Ziblatt describe have, unfortunately, become relevant again. A plurality of American voters compared Donald Trump to an accomplished, eloquent, public-spirited Woman of Color, and decided they wanted Trump back. At this writing, Americans prepare to see which of Trump’s anti-democratic, authoritarian promises he intends to follow through on, and which will fall victim to sectarian infighting. American democracy really depends, now, on how incompetent the incoming administration actually promises to be.

Our authors describe how prior democracies shuddered and died. Their descriptions of France between the World Wars, and the anti-democratic forces that halted the legislature, seem chillingly like the swarms of angry insurgents who invaded and vandalized the Capitol Building on January 6th, 2021. The Peronists’ inability to comprehend their electoral loss in Argentina in 1983, despite their concrete pro-worker platform, remind readers of the Democrats’ inability to comprehend their loss in November of 2024.

But it’s difficult to avoid noticing that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t delve much into the strong anti-democratic tendency in American politics. Not that it’s absent: they do mention, say, Joseph McCarthy, who would’ve gladly overturned the entire government to purge Communist influences. They excoriate the filibuster rule, which allows only one or two Senators—in a legislative house that already protects poorer, less populous—to stop debate and kill bills with just a quick email.

But America has always had an aggressive anti-democratic contingent in its electorate. Around the same time Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote this book, Rachel Maddow wrote that a number of non-profit and civic organizations took money from the German government before World War II. These groups campaigned actively to weaken America’s small-D democratic institutions, bolster White supremacist government, and join the wrong side of the looming war. As with Trump himself, most pro-Reich conspirators went unprosecuted.

Steven Levitsky (left) and Daniel Ziblatt (via Harvard University)

It’s not that Levitsky and Ziblatt don’t address anti-democratictendencies preceding Donald Trump. Quite the opposite, they run out quite a laundry list. The way that, for instance, the Klan arose in direct opposition to the Reconstruction effort to enfranchise newly freed Black Americans. The way White leaders in Wilmington, North Carolina, overthrew the city government and installed their loyalists, the only successful coup d’etat in American history so far. Our authors acknowledge these happened.

Rather, they treat these events as atomized, existing within their own sphere. They don’t go beyond events to draw conclusions about why this happens, why every attempt to increase American democracy consistently generates violent resistance. Whenever Americans have attempted to give People of Color the right to vote, we’ve witnessed a countervailing move to make voting harder and more exclusive. It keeps happening, because it represents something deeper and more fundamental than the event itself.

In no small part, it represents a deification of the past because it’s the past. As Jason Stanley writes, great thinkers of prior eras—including the authors of America’s Constitution—have much to teach us. But we can only learn when we regard them as askers of important questions. When past masters become too important to question, their accomplishments sacrosanct and beyond the domain of doubt, a different dynamic sets in. We ourselves become fossilized.

America’s Constitution is approaching 250 years old, and at this writing, hasn’t been amended in 32 years. It’s become an artifact, something that demands preservation simply because it’s old, not because it provides us meaningful guidance in answering today’s questions. A major contingent of American lawmaking believes we need to preserve the vision of White slaveholders in powdered wigs and knee breeches simply because that which is older is necessarily more valuable than the present.

Levitsky and Ziblatt are responsible social scientists, limiting themselves to what happened, and what they can quantify. They trust readers to draw conclusions. But the 2024 electoral results, when a plurality of Americans chose the anti-democratic Presidential candidate, demonstrate that Americans broadly can’t identify patterns and draw conclusions. Real-world evidence shows that Americans don’t need scientists, we need pop philosophers, like Tocqueville and Burke, to go beyond the evidence and draw out the deeper story.

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

Teenage Torture and Softcore Self-Indulgence

Harleigh Beck, Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: an Erotic Horror Story

It’s been nearly a year since Skyler and Evelyn killed their high school’s star quarterback, Nate, in a totally avoidable hit-and-run accident. They’ve kept their culpability secret for an entire year, despite the rumor-mongering common in small towns. But as the anniversary approaches, Skyler begins seeing Nate everywhere. She fears his spirit hungers for revenge, until he astounds her by showing up, alive and unmarked, in the high school hallway.

To review this novel, I must first acknowledge: I’m not Harleigh Beck’s intended audience. Before page one, Beck dedicates this novel “For all of my erotic horror girlies.” Not women, girlies. Beck has selected a mostly young, primarily female audience, presumably one whose ability to appreciate literature is uncluttered by excessive prior reading. Perhaps that’s why Beck pinches liberally from Tobe Hooper, Ambrose Bierce, Kevin Williamson, and more.

The seemingly resurrected Nate wants revenge on Skyler specifically. And the revenge he wants is specifically sexual in nature. Though Skyler, who narrates most of this novel in first person, repeatedly emphasizes her plainness and lack of desirability, she has constant attention from several boys—a staple of young adult fiction. But while Dustin and Max want to date Skyler, Nate wants to humiliate, degrade, and dominate her.

And Skyler loves it.

Although these characters are high school students, and several important scenes happen inside their school, Skyler and Nate occupy a world substantially devoid of adults, surnames, and other indicators. Only in the epilogue do any adults (besides Skyler’s mostly absent, milquetoast dad) appear, or any characters receive surnames. Group dynamics mimic teen movies from the 1990s and 2000s. Characters, individually or together, are beholden to Hollywood boilerplates.

Only in Nate’s tortures of Skyler do events vary from cinematic standards. By day, Nate finds ways to isolate and gaslight Skyler. By night, he seeks increasingly embarrassing ways to sexually torment her, promising to eventually deflower and assassinate her. His conflation of sex and death would trigger Sigmund Freud’s alarm bells, not only for his dominant power trip, but also the increasing gratification Skyler feels at her forced submission.

Beck divides the novel into two parts. (Three actually, but the third is a brief codicil.) Part One mimics conventional teen horror. Nate tortures Skyler in broad daylight, blackmailing her into complicity by threatening to reveal what happened that fateful night. Nate’s malevolent predations exist amid a context of teenage ennui: high school, where everybody fits pre-written social roles, and Skyler’s home life, where Dad has become a phantom.

Harleigh Beck
Part Two occurs in a single frenetic night. Teenagers gather at an abandoned vacation cabin for a Halloween party, where Nate decides to finally enact his revenge. Somehow, while Nate cleaves a body count, Agatha Christie style, through the amassed teens, nobody pauses the party. The atmosphere of adolescent banality that permeates Part One becomes oppressive in Part Two, as Skyler increasingly realizes why she’s trapped inside with her tormentor.

Previous reviewers have raved about Beck’s “twist ending,” which has become an obligatory component of genre fiction today. This further demonstrates that Beck writes for an audience unclouded by excessive genre familiarity, because without spoilers, she signposts the twist from around page 20. Besides, it’ll take serious gumption to write twists exceeding Catriona Ward, so maybe authors should pause that boilerplate for now.

And the erotic component? Beck highlights that component in her promotional material, and considers herself so transgressive that she requires a full-page trigger warning in the front matter. So does the content stir my loins? No, but I’m not seventeen, like these characters. They seemingly find eros in describing body parts and saying dirty words. They’re clearly finding their sexuality, and as students, reduce the experience to limbs and anatomy.

I find myself neither frightened, nor aroused, nor invested in character development, as characters develop according to their designated Hollywood roles. But again, I’m not Beck’s preferred audience: I’m a middle-aged male who’s watched horror movies for thirty years. Beck writes for a more naive audience unjaded by either sex or death. Perhaps it matters that Skyler repeatedly protests her Laurie Strode-like innocence.

Perhaps Beck would rather write big-ticket film treatments. Perhaps this story might make stirring, acceptably dangerous late-night Netflix viewing. But just reading it, where I set my own pace, I’m too conscious of Beck’s cinematic sources and shopworn cliches. Beck has an earnest, skillful voice and handles English well, so I finished the novel easily. But without either eros or thanos, I close the book and think: “Meh.”

Wednesday, December 25, 2024

What I Want For Next Christmas

On the Saturday before Christmas, 2024, I tested positive for COVID-19. This is my second confirmed bout of the disease (I also believe I had a third, unconfirmed case). I'm spending the holiday alone, forced to deny myself the one thing I wanted for Christmas: time with the family and friends I love.

Within my generation, I've watched the world change, mostly for the worse. Anti-science woo-woo practitioners, a fringe subculture thirty years ago, have organized online on an unprecedented scale. While COVID-19 has become the malaria of our time, deadly but banal, antivax forces seemingly conspire to resurrect polio, measles, and tuberculosis. Pro-science rationalists can't counter this because they're fatigued from arguing against Flat Earthers and Seven-Day Creationists.

Nor are anti-science nuts alone. Historian Kathleen Belew writes that White Power insurrectionists organized online back in the 1980s. The January 6th, 2021, Capitol invasion was the culmination of years of preparation, for which progressives remain unready. We believers in civil rights for the downtrodden are stuck in the era of Mother Jones and Woody Guthrie, believing that marching will bring liberation. The bigots are organized, prepared to bring the high-tech hammer of empire down, hard.

Jesus Christ was born into similar circumstances, in an occupied nation in a globalized empire. While ordinary Jews sought leadership to resist, their actual leaders squabbled about what to do. Fight back (Zealots)? Comply in advance (Sadducees)? Focus on individual righteousness (Pharisees)? Flee the world (Essenes)? No option, taken alone, seems sufficient.

When Christ uses the term “The Kingdom of God” throughout his ministry, he means it literally. The Kingdom isn't a poetic metaphor, it's a nation we live in right now. When Jews lived as a conquered state with a puppet monarch, Jesus offered an alternate citizenship. Caesar’s terrestrial government of grandeur, gold, and military parades, isn't our homeland. We dwell in another Kingdom, right now.

How do we exercise this alternate citizenship? Keep the commandments. Feed the hungry, clothe the naked, welcome the lost foreigner. Set the prisoners free.

The older I get, the further I grow from belief in an anthropomorphic God among the clouds. Yet paradoxically, this draws me closer to Christ's message. If this world's systems encourage distrust and bigotry, Christ offers alternate systems of love, mission, and mutuality. Christ's systems lift one another up, sustain a wounded earth, and restore justice to an unjust world.

And we call those systems “God.”

Remember, back during lockdown, when churches were reported as the largest vectors of infection? I believe this happened because people lost track of why church exists. Too many churchgoers saw worship as a moral goal in itself. Therefore, having sung and clapped and hugged and sat through the homily, they saw the process as complete. Then they went home, relaxed, and coughed on one another.

Instead, church should be the place we go to recommit ourselves to the systems Christ initiated. Singing the songs while ignoring the message is exactly what Jesus meant, in Matthew, in saying: “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of My Father who is in heaven.”

Equally important, church should be the place we organize. Because, as stated, the forces of ignorance and empire are organized, prepared to crush the already weak and kill the already marginalized. Our hymns should be protest marching songs, our sermons should be plans of action, and our prayers should be motivations to act. Church shouldn't be our refuge from the world, it should be where we find strength to face the world and say no.

People who know me might counter by pointing out how bad I am at fronting the resistance. That's true. When working alone, I'm easily discouraged by the workload and cowed by confrontation. But that's the point. I shouldn't have to work alone; supported by the systems of justice we call God, I should join arms with fellow believers and face the challenges together. When we bolster one another, that's when we become the church.

Monday, upon learning that I'd be quarantined on Christmas, a local friend and his wife offered to reserve part of their Christmas dinner and bring it to me. At that moment, I felt like part of the community. I realized that I wanted to feel that in the church. Earthly powers want us to feel alone, desperate, and in competition for scraps. The Kingdom reminds us we're never alone, we face all challenges together.