The Beginning of Truth at the End of Civilization

Ronald Malfi, Bone White

A scruffy, frostbitten mountain man wanders into a rural Alaska diner, orders a hot beverage, and casually confesses to eight murders. Then he patiently waits for the state bulls to arrive from Fairbanks. The accused’s strange confession, and the particularly gruesome murders, soon become national news, and Paul Gallo, a Maryland literature prof, recognizes the landscape where his brother disappeared. So he catches the next plane to Alaska.

I have conflicted feelings about Ronald Malfi’s thriller of isolation, atmosphere, and paranoia. On one hand, Malfi subjects his characters to innovative tortures on the perimeters of civilization, tortures which explore the characters’ depths and the extremes they’ll reach to survive. On the other hand, Malfi relies upon the Blair Witch horror model, the city-dweller’s terror at wilderness, amplified by the characters’ lack of Cub Scout-level survival skills.

Investigator Jill Ryerson of the Alaska Bureau of Investigation as seen remarkable crimes on America’s “Last Frontier.” For her, human rationality comes to the tundra to die. But even she’s shocked by the violence and rot she finds in Joseph Mallory’s isolated cabin outside Dread’s Hand, Alaska. (Yes, “Dread’s Hand.” Malfi’s symbolism isn’t light-handed.) But for all his candor, Mallory refuses to explain his motivation, leaving Ryerson even more confused.

Paul Gallo absolutely knows his twin brother is among Mallory’s victims. Danny’s last text came from Dread’s Hand, after all. Paul and Danny were Corsican twins growing up, but as adults, they’ve felt disconnected, and wandered through life seeking purpose. So Paul heads for Alaska, hoping not only for answers, but also to reconnect with the missing half of his soul. Imagine his shock when Ryerson’s investigation turns up…

Nothing.

Malfi’s story heats up in Act II, when Paul, disgusted with Ryerson’s lack of procedural headway, undertakes his own investigation. The East Coast city boy rents an SUV and heads into Alaska’s mountainous interior, and if this sounds ominous, it is. Malfi’s high-handed atmospherics really gain steam here, as Paul questions a community that’s kept secrets aggressively for generations. As often in horror fiction, local yokels are the scariest phantoms.

Ronald Malfi

Simultaneously, however, Malfi relaxes into genre stereotypes. His dead-eyed provincials shouting “Y’all just git!” are pinched straight from better-known literature; James Dickey’s Deliverance, and its better-known movie adaptation, spring to mind. Malfi has described this book in interviews as his most autobiographical (I don’t know his CV, so can’t confirm). But one starts suspecting Malfi has lived much of his life through books and movies.

His worldbuilding supports this doubt. He makes fleeting mistakes about both Fairbanks and Annapolis which reveal, to those with local knowledge, that he mostly researched these locations online. So many Dread’s Hand locals warn Paul that he’s risking getting stranded all winter that, when it doesn’t happen, we’re astounded. I’m not sure whether I appreciate or loathe this subversion of Chekhov’s Gun. Maybe a hybrid.

Wilderness, for Paul (and Malfi), is metaphorical, not physical. When Paul abandons the signposts of comfortable suburban life to seek truth in the hinterlands, he abandons the comfortable presumptions which his White American upbringing bequeathed him. An AmLit professor, he’s spent his life teaching students to find truth in others’ texts. But he reaches a point where his only truth exists in places where no paths or pre-built infrastructure exist.

Which, when presented in LitCrit analysis, sounds pretty cool. But Malfi’s actual storytelling relies on mass-media depictions of country life, including crude nature demigods, crudely drawn animals, and fear of countrified superstition. One gets the feeling, reading Paul’s journey, that Malfi never took an orienteering course or camped overnight in the woods. His depictions are crude, sweeping, and stereotyped, yet somehow, Paul finds ways of surviving.

I can’t help wondering if Malfi read Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, about another college-educated city boy who abandoned the map in Alaska’s wilderness, and learned the wrong lessons. Malfi seemingly believes that the physical, non-metaphorical wilderness is a place where people go to learn themselves, push their limits, and emerge transformed. Which it can be, if they take the time to prepare. But that’s not what Paul does.

The contrast is ironic. Malfi writes about a man who escapes the comfortable but stultifying confines of White modernity to discover the harsh but liberating truth. But he writes it using familiar, market-tested storytelling tropes, assembled like Lego bricks. There’s a lot I like about Malfi’s book, particularly his ambitious themes and deeper questions. But the tools he uses to address those themes and questions are just too comfy.

“Easy Words” and the Tyranny of Literature

Social media doesn’t allow complex thought, nuanced analysis, or Socratic discussion. I think everyone can appreciate that. Anybody who’s ever tweeted “I like apples” and gotten dogpiled for not including oranges, kumquats, and jackfruit in their synopsis knows what I mean. Especially on platforms like Xitter, Threads, and Bluesky, which cap post lengths, the internet flattens difficult topics, squelches humor, and rewards anger. That’s why I still blog.

I don’t want to rehash last week’s Threads debacle over what constitutes excessively difficult language. The two accompanying images should suffice. One platform user requested authors to “use easy words,” citing scrying as an example of needless difficulty. (Some defenders claim this was a joke, though the humor eludes me.) Following a Kelly Marie Tran-level pile-on, another user posted a defense that made things worse by correlating dictionary use with ableism.

The post that created the controversy

I’m more interested in the underlying assumptions about literacy, ability, and writing. As a sometime writing teacher, I recall struggling with students who used clipped vocabulary, short sentences, and especially passive voice construction. I don’t like getting involved in the controversy surrounding America’s purported literacy crisis, mostly because it feels like a media-fueled moral panic. But youth do, anecdotally, have difficulty writing nowadays.

Which is, on consideration, weird. If anything, young adults write more today than my generation did. Emails, text messages, social media posts—these remain mostly language-based communication modes. Youth share in online discussion boards, chat-based RPGs, and other participatory, text-centric communications. Platforms like Smashwords, AO3, and Wattpad have turned youth into published authors without kowtowing to the Big Five publishing conglomerates.

Yet that practice didn’t translate into greater writing capability in my classroom. I recall students using the justification that “I write how I speak,” which I think they believed meant they used a casual tone and relaxed grammar, without a lot of pausing to consider the nuances of word choice. Which, fair enough, I often do too, especially when writing fiction and trying to capture a character’s authentic voice.

So why the difficulty? Students came into my Freshman Comp class having written far more than my peers did outside the classroom (notwithstanding us aspiring authors). They use their own characteristic tones, rather than trying to affect a scholarly tone. They should be able to produce something beyond the short sentences, sweeping generalizations, and tedious reliance on “to be” verbs that plagued me attempting to read their output.

Not to get all Marshall McLuhan on you, but the difference probably involves not what content youth read, but where they read it. Yes, youth write copious text messages. But the SMS format, and the difficulty typing with thumbs, discourages long sentences and nuanced vocabulary. Heck, it even discourages punctuation. I used to wonder why students had such difficulty with comma placement, but texting discourage comma use altogether.

The attempted defense that made things worse

Scrying seems, to me, a pretty straightforward word. I discovered it in grade school while reading Grimm’s Fairy Tales. But the Brothers Grimm, besides being adults themselves, were also transcribing oral tales delivered by community elders, tales which had been passed down, largely intact, across generations. I read books commensurate with my reading ability, mostly published by conglomerate publishers, written by experienced professional authors, who were mostly adults.

You might detect an element of elitism in this, and I won’t deny it. Not just anybody who constructs a sentence is an author, but the person who learns from the best sentence builders of the past and present. Just like not everybody at karaoke is a singer, but the ones who take the time to learn vocalism and breath control and range, the capacity to write comes from apprenticing oneself to better writers and working at it for years.

Instead, youth write copious texts to their friends, but much of their reading consists of texts from their friends. Too many aspiring authors who post fanfic to Wattpad mostly read other fanfic authors on Wattpad. Rather than giving them something to strive after, and challenging content that refines their thinking, it results in a persistent regression toward the mean, as all new writing resembles what came before.

That original Threads user didn’t deserve the abuse they received, a dogpile so severe that they apparently fled social media. But “easy words” is a request for reading as a passive activity, which readers fall into without resistance. It’s a request to feel good enough as we are, to have authors hug us and say “good job.” That’s not a kind of reading I want to do.

What’s a Trillion, More or Less?

Elon Musk

Last week’s declaration that Elon Musk has become history’s first trillionaire has me thinking about what a dollar means in today’s economy. Not in the ordinary moralistic sense of it being wrong that he has a trillion dollars, while nearly one in five American children is food insecure. No, rather, I question what Elon actually has. Because it sure isn’t money in the sense that most citizens have money.

Start with how Musk became rich. He didn’t create or sell anything valuable. His IPO on SpaceX common shares enjoyed a price jump, causing the fraction of shares in Musk’s hands to increase. In other words, his “net worth” includes the promised future value of transactions he hasn’t yet made. You or I can claim future transactions as personal value only under specific circumstances, controlled by regulations and personal integrity.

This personal integrity component matters. Musk’s notorious buyout of Twitter caused massive financial losses that reduced stock values by half. Then he stopped the bleeding by selling Twitter’s successor company, X.com, to xAI, his tech startup. He moved his holdings from one pocket to another, giving himself a markup along the way. He later repeated the trick, selling xAI to SpaceX, mere months before selling SpaceX to Wall Street.

Each of these transactions created money without creating value. Neither Twitter nor xAI saw their corporate functioning improved by the transaction; in fact, neither has ever turned a profit. Neither has SpaceX. Smarter critics than me have analyzed the SpaceX IPO and determined that it involves nothing but high-minded promises and Elon’s personal financial network. Tesla’s mediocre cars have no resale value, and the Boring Company’s tunnels barely exist.

Please remember, when we discuss Musk’s “net worth,” we mean its dollar value, not actual dollars he has. Musk’s fortune mainly consists of his stock portfolio, which mostly comprises his own companies. He pumps their floating value by making his companies seem desirable, but he also controls the supply, keeping them scarce. He cannot ever sell his stock holdings, because that would flood the market and crash their value.

Musk isn’t a trillionaire because of products he makes, services he provides, or material he sells. He’s a trillionaire because of resources he owns. This is the definition of capitalism. Sometimes, when we reformists deride “capitalism,” conservatives accuse us of opposing free markets. Not so: markets exist in economic models other than capitalism. Rather, capitalism is the system that controls who owns which resources, and how they’re priced.

Home Depot is a market. So is the informal collocation of off-the-books day laborers in the Home Depot’s parking lot. Home Depot’s market is regulated by legislation, Federal Reserve policy, and labor law. The day laborer market is regulated by trust and honor. But only the Home Depot is capitalist, since it also owns its concrete slab building, its supply contracts, and the parking lot where the day laborers meet.

But Musk has reached a plane where Home Depot can’t reach. Home Depot has value only if it creates value for other people. It must sell product at sufficient mark-up to generate profit, but not so much that it discourages commerce. It must both read the present market, and anticipate future trends. And it must make moral compromises, such as letting undocumented day laborers use its grounds.

Let’s put it another way. A friend of mine, a registered Libertarian and outspoken Musk supporter, owns the local craft brewery. He owns his building, his tanks, his trucks, and his distribution contracts. But to remain solvent and pay his workers, he must produce beer. He can’t sell futures on his proposed ability to produce epoch-making innovative beer, eventually, then punt down the road. He must sell beer now.

This doesn’t apply to Musk. Of the six corporations Musk controls—Tesla, X Corp, xAI, SpaceX, NeuraLink, and the Boring Company—only Tesla currently sells products on the open market. And those, as reported by neutral reviewers, are good-enough cars whose resale value is undercut by limited battery life. Musk mostly sells the promise of future dividends, a promise he’s never consummated, and keeps moving into the future.

It’s apparently paradoxical. He’s charmless in media interviews, disdains workers and women, espouses small-f fascist politics, and sells mostly empty promises. Yet the retail value of those promises has made Musk a trillionaire. Which means that, ultimately, the foundation of that trillion is Musk himself. At least Cornelius Vanderbilt, for all his dick-swinging vulgarity, built actual railroads. What even is Elon’s trillion?

Trek vs. Wars, or, Who's the Better Star?

The original Star Trek bridge crew, sitting comfortably with their moral certainty

Throughout my lifetime, one defining debate in niche culture has been: which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek? Which franchise reflects what we latterly call “nerd culture” in the most practical, incisive way? I’ve always disagreed with the question, because it seemed to me that the two franchises served different purposes. Arguing which was better seemed like debating whether you loved your pancreas or liver more, as though removing one would kill you less.

Star Trek always tried to be more concrete, humane, and values-driven. The structure always featured a new encounter with an alien species, rampant technology, or breakaway sect. And each conflict was, each in different ways, solved by the characters applying Gene Roddenberry’s humanist philosophy. Exactly what that means changed over time—the original series was more swaggering and colonial than TNG, for instance—but it was built to change. It was designed to remain open-ended.

By contrast, George Lucas designed Star Wars to end. It intended to encompass Luke Skywalker’s transition from provincial peasant to galactic hero, and at least as Lucas outlined, it would then end. Whether we want that “original” ending to be the medal ceremony at the conclusion of the first movie, or the destruction of the Empire at the conclusion of the third, either way, the story intended to resolve with Luke assuming his mature role.

So Roddenberry wrote one franchise to continue, while Lucas wrote the other with an arc that resolved. Yet time hasn’t allowed either outcome. The recent release of The Mandalorian and Grogu, the twelfth canon Star Wars feature film, accords it with the MCU and James Bond for stories that just continue, long after the cultural milieu that created them has ended. And Star Trek has, if anything fared even worse, at least in fan accounting.

Recent Star Trek outings like Strange New Worlds and Starfleet Academy have received pummelings from fan critics. Admittedly, the internet has given cranky fans a nearly limitless platform to complain about virtually everything. Especially with popular franchises, new entries have suffered in the ratings because of advance fan opposition; outings like Captain Ake or the Fifteenth Doctor have been lame ducks before their episodes even appeared, because of closed-minded, hostile, and even violent fan reactions.

The Abrams movies resurrected Yoda, because Luke wasn't allowed to finish growing up

Put another way, Star Trek’s core audience doesn’t experience the show anymore, they revere it. Most current Star Trek fans weren’t alive when the original series aired, and even first-generation TNG fans are in their fifties and up. The most vocal and committed audience base didn’t experience Star Trek in its cultural context on Cold War belligerence and America’s struggle with its own imperialist history. Star Trek wasn’t an abstraction, it manifested America’s fraying conscience.

Like holy texts, like the Bible or the Koran, Star Trek seems (falsely) to speak for itself. The cultural conflicts it commented upon have become fodder for historians and schoolbooks, not something the audience is steeped in. You could say something similar about Star Wars, which certainly commented upon the post-Vietnam landscape. But Star Wars held itself aloof, a willingly timeless goulash of space wizards, samurai movies, and Flying Tigers splendor that pretended to neutrality.

J.J. Abrams, who sanded Roddenberry’s humanist morals off Star Trek, also snipped off Star Wars’ Jungian roots. He turned the Starship Enterprise into a Lucasian circus, while he rendered the Millenium Falcon into a time capsule that, somehow, must keep fighting. Admittedly, he didn’t do that alone. Besides the connivance of producer Kathleen Kennedy, the process included Lucas himself, who licensed new content in 1990 and flooded the market with novels, comics, and canon movies.

In other words, Star Wars, like LotR or Narnia, was always supposed to end. But, controlled by America’s largest media conglomerate, it can’t; not while money exists to wring from audiences. For thirty-six years (as I write), Skywalker and company have been forced to re-fight their original battles, amended only by meaningless set dressing. They never get to govern the galaxy they liberated, because they’re busy constantly resisting another apocalyptic empire that, somehow, never dies.

Meanwhile, Star Trek had no limiting arc. It had little canon continuity until The Wrath of Khan; it simply responded to surrounding culture. This fluidity reflects in how the franchise constantly moves Khan Noonien Singh’s birthdate: Trek isn’t designed to be consistent, it’s designed to be current. Yet fan reverence for its roots keeps the most strident audiences from seeing the story in the present, reducing it into a lifeless artifact, a fly in amber.

Life in the New Protein Carnival

We already know that public standards in food consumption are deeply fad-driven. From the grapefruit diet of the 1930s to “organic” food in the 1970s—a concept that means something very different now than it did then—to low-carb diets in the 2000s, mass-marketed ideas of healthy diets rise and, usually, fall. We’ve all experienced serious dietary regimes in our own lives or those of loved ones, usually dressed in the ceremonial robes of science.

Currently, high-protein diets apparently dominate. Health-conscious eaters, especially men, seem obsessed with ensuring every meal includes a source of protein. (Speaking anecdotally, of course.) For most people, “protein” is synonymous with red meat, which results in people gorging on beef and pork. Of course, we can ask who benefits from this, especially in America’s highly subsidized meat growing system, with its network of often inhumane confined animal feeding operations. But how does this diet affect humans?

A recent stumble through the grocery store showed me significant numbers of foods bolstered with protein. High-protein breakfast cereals and breads. High-protein granola and pretzels. High-protein cheese and yogurt. Okay, those last two might just be opportunistic marketing, because cheese and yogurt are just dairy products fermented to bring out the protein, which is the substance that makes them more solid than milk. But even where “high protein” is cynical marketing, it’s become ubiquitous.

Then I saw high-protein water. Okay, it was sparkling water, which is already fortified with ingredients like sugar, fruit juice, and herbal supplements. But seriously, folks, high-protein water? Whose diet is so lacking in basic nutrition that they have to supplement it with faux soda-pop? At some point, these markers become an indication that the market has become saturated, and that it’s nothing but an advertising niche, intended to part the gullible from their money.

In fairness, I’m a biased source. Doctors recently diagnosed me with a disease caused by my body’s inability to eliminate proteins, which my liver turns into uric acid, and deposits in my joints. Early last month, gout left me in such disabling pain that I could barely walk for days, and spent weeks relying on a cane. This reflects my diet, and my mother taught me several recipes, all of which started by browning the meat.

For some people, gout also comes from drinking alcohol. Not me, though; I don’t drink often enough for that. Though determining the exact culprit would require expensive lab work that I can’t afford, my doctor and I decided, based on best available evidence, that my gout was most likely caused by overconsumption of animal protein. Alleviating my symptoms means reducing my meat and cheese consumption, so I basically have to relearn how to cook.

Not everyone has gout, certainly. But approximately one in 25 American adults has it, enough to count as medically “common.” Nor is gout the only protein-related disease, despite it currently looming large in my life. Excess protein can cause kidney and liver diseases, cardiovascular problems, digestive inflammation, and plain old weight gain. That’s saying nothing of nutritional insufficiency when eaters fill up on meat, and the protein crowds out vegetables, fiber, and other diverse foods.

Some people need (or want) higher protein for legitimate reasons. Bodybuilders and weightlifters need protein to achieve the useful, photogenic muscles that pay their bills. Patients suffering from certain nutritional insufficiencies or malabsorption issues may need more protein than most people. But these are specialized cases and, especially for the bodybuilders, a temporary state necessary to achieve clearly defined goals with end dates. Nobody ought to eat like this for the rest of their lives.

Yet the popularity of ketogenic and low-carb diets have people loading on proteins in hopes of looking like fashion models well into their fifties. The American diet is already the most meat-rich on Earth, and the health risks have been visible for years. Jordan Peterson famously put himself on an all-red meat diet, claimed extravagant health benefits—and has almost vanished from public view over the last year as his body lapsed into catastrophic collapse.

Please don’t misunderstand me: I don’t advocate complete vegetarianism. I tried that in graduate school, and discovered that the human body simply can’t replace certain nutrients that come from meat. But like in most of life, health comes through balance. Gorging ourselves on proteins has only temporary, nominal effects. Putting proteins in places they don’t belong, like fizzy beverages, isn’t healthy, it’s a sign of deep cultural imbalance that will warp our bodies and health.