Will We Ever Get Tired of Re-Fighting Old Battles?

Promo still from the last time someone dragged The X-Files out of the deep freeze

This weekend’s illegal American bombing of Iran arrives hand-in-glove with another cultural announcement: Hulu is relaunching The X-Files. Preliminary announcements call it a “reboot,” but deeper reportage suggests it’s more a soft reboot, a continuation with new leads. Simultaneously, reports suggest there might be a long-awaited season five for Veronica Mars. (This is more ambiguous, maybe misreading the series being acquired by Netflix; wording is fuzzy.)

I’ve complained before about the cultural currents behind constant reboots. Pop culture is always behind the times anyway, and the flood of streaming media has made the biggest entertainment conglomerates more timid, not less. But this feels different. The resurrection of two popular franchises, thirty-three and twenty-four years old respectively, amid a “Make America Great Again” culture feels more than timid. It feels like a hasty retreat from reality.

Throughout the Current President’s 2016 campaign, he decried urban violence and burning cities, despite such violence being at near-historic lows. But his rhetoric makes sense in his life context, as the Bronx famously caught fire in the late 1970s, the same time he moved into Manhattan real estate with his purchase of the former Commodore Hotel. The poor future President was simply trapped in the sociopolitical milieu of his thirties, unable to grow.

Similarly, this weekend’s bombing of Iranian civilian targets mirrors the President’s unhealed past. Consider his inability to stop heaving accusations against the Central Park Five, nearly a quarter century after they were exonerated. This President retains grudges and political interpretations molded by a privileged youth and segregated social set. In context, he likely bombed Iran, not really for its nuclear program, but as payback for the 1979 Hostage Crisis.

This has become the default for much American politics. We aren’t facing the past, we’re relitigating the past. In the 1980s, both political discourse and mass media desperately wanted to re-fight the Vietnam War, but correctly this time. Franchises like Iron Eagle, Rambo, and Top Gun promised to purge America’s Vietnam disgrace. More recently, Call of Duty and James Bond try to tweak our memory of the Cold War.

Caught in the interregnum between the Cold War and the Global War on Terror, the Clinton decade offered enforced cheerfulness, a frothy meringue of Empire Records and Ben Stiller’s early career. The X-Files directly countered that, maintaining post-Reagan cynicism toward America’s surface culture. Scully and (especially) Mulder walked through neon-soaked midnight landscapes, uniquely able to see the venality that made that era’s party ethos possible.

Kristen Bell in the original network run of Veronica Mars

Veronica Mars pushed this contrast to the extreme. Read superficially, the series presented a stereotyped Southern California panorama, all hypersaturated colors and loud, jangly indie pop soundscapes. Only Veronica and her father—and, eventually, those trapped in their decaying orbit—understood the vulgar horse-trading and human commodities that subsidized Neptune, California’s skin-deep glamour. Veronica, like Mulder, was ready to expose the lie, damn the consequences.

Both franchises took dim opinions of power structures. Veronica Mars fought plush-bottomed police as often as criminals, while Mulder and sometimes Scully brought official corruption to light despite, not because of, the law. But both presented a morally distinct, binary universe. Neptune’s Sheriff Lamb and the Smoking Man were clearly evil, and needed exposed to a public which their shows depicted as passive and sheep-like, desperate for an underdog hero.

Unfortunately, the political tenor has changed. From the impotent government depicted in the 1970s, to the malignant one of the 1990s, the problem has been presented as siloed at the top. The disclosure of the Epstein documents, like the Panama Papers before them, has revealed a network of politicians, capitalists, entertainers, academics, and scientists colluding to support an otherwise decrepit system. The “secret” isn’t secret anymore.

While politicians and media captains want to refight the battles of their, or our, childhood, rapidly unfolding news reveals their vision of the problem as charmingly naïve. Nary a top-tier capitalist or government insider didn’t share information with Epstein. Public intellectuals like Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins had their hands in his pockets. The rot isn’t an isolated, partisan tumor. Everyone, everywhere in the system, has been proved complicit.

Veronica Mars and The X-Files helped define a generation’s idea of acceptable villains. They showed our lawkeepers were complicit with lawbreakers in the anarchy most people felt in their ordinary lives. But reality has overtaken the scope these shows made possible. Bringing back the monsters of my twenties is worse than quaint. It offers audiences my age an excuse to avoid the monsters that have revealed themselves in reality.

Lee Brice in Country Music’s Nostalgia Pits

Lee Brice (promo photo)

Lee Brice debuted his new song, “Country Nowadays,” at the TPUSA Super Bowl halftime show on February 8, and it was… disappointing. Brice visibly struggled to fingerpick and sing at the same time, and gargled into the microphone with a diminished rage that, presumably, he meant to resemble J.J. Cale. The product sounded like an apprentice singer-songwriter struggling through an open-mike night in a less reputable Nashville nightclub.

More attention, though, has stuck to Brice’s lyrics. The entire show ran over half an hour, but pundits have replayed the same fifteen seconds of Brice moaning the opening lines:

I just want to cut my grass, feed my dogs, wear my boots
Not turn the TV on, sit and watch the evening news
Be told if I tell my own daughter that little boys ain’t little girls
I’d be up the creek in hot water in this cancel-your ass-world.

Jon Stewart, that paragon of nonpartisan fairness, crowed that nobody’s stopping Brice from cutting his grass, feeding his dogs, or wearing his boots. Like that’s a winning stroke. Focusing on Brice’s banal laundry list misses the point, that Brice actively aspires to be middle-class and nondescript. But he believes that knowing and caring about other people’s issues makes him oppressed in a diverse, complex world.

One recalls the ubiquitous 2012 cartoon which circulated on social media with its attribution and copyright information cropped off. A man with a military haircut and Marine Corps sleeve stripes repeatedly orders “Just coffee, black.” A spike-haired barista with a nose ring tries to upsell him several specialty coffees he doesn’t want. Of course, nobody’s ever really had this interaction, but many people think they have.

Both Lee Brice and the coffee cartoonist aspire to live in a consistent, low-friction world. If your understanding of the recent-ish past comes from mass media, you might imagine the world lacked conflict, besides the acceptable conflict of the Cold War. John Wayne movies, Leave It to Beaver, and mid-century paperback novels presented a morally concise and economically stable world, in which White protagonists could restore balance by swinging a fist.

The coffee cartoon, with its unreadable
signature (click to enlarge)

By contrast, Brice and the coffee cartoonist face the same existential terror: the world doesn’t center me anymore. Yes, I said “existential terror.” What Brice sings with maudlin angst, and the cartoon plays for yuks, is a fear-based response, struggling to understand one’s place in the world. We all face that terror when becoming adults, of course. But once upon a time, we Honkies had social roles written for us.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: “bein’ country,” as Brice sang, today means being assiduously anti-modern. Country music’s founders, particularly the Carter Family and Jimmy Rogers, were assiduously engaged with current events in the Great Depression. This especially includes A.P. Carter, who couldn’t have written his greatest music without Esley Riddle, a disabled Black guitarist. Country’s origins were manifestly progressive.

But around 1964, when the Beatles overtook the pop charts, several former rockers with Southern roots found themselves artistically homeless. Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, Jerry Lee Lewis, and others managed to reinvent themselves as country musicians by simply emphasizing their native twang. But their music shifted themes distinctly. Their lyrics looked backward to beatified sharecropper pasts, peacefully sanded of economic inequality and political friction.

In 2004, Tim McGraw released “Back When,” a similar (though less partisan) love song to the beatified past. McGraw longs for a time “back when a Coke was a Coke, and a screw was a screw.” I don’t know whether McGraw deliberately channeled Merle Haggard’s 1982 song “Are the Good Times Really Over,” in which he sang “I wish Coke was still cola, and a joint was a bad place to go.”

Haggard notably did something Brice and McGraw don’t: he slapped a date on the “good times.” He sang: “Back before Elvis, or the Beatles.” That is, before 1954, when Haggard turned 17 and saw Lefty Frizzell in concert. Haggard, like McGraw or Brice, doesn’t yearn for any specific time. He misses stage of personal development when he didn’t have to make active choices or take responsibility for his actions.

Country musicians, especially men, love to cosplay adulthood, wearing tattered work shirts and pitching their singing voices down. Yet we see this theme developed across decades: virtue exists in the past, when life lacked diversity or conflict, and half-formed youths could nestle in social roles like a hammock. Lee Brice’s political statement, like generations before him, is to refuse to face grown-up reality.

The Doomed Promise of Change from Within

Bull Connor looses the dogs on protesters in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 3rd, 1963

“Why don’t you try applying for ICE and see if you can maybe change things from within?”

I’ve been out of work for several months now with precious few leads and no real opportunities pending. I can’t be the only one in this situation, as our national policy-makers keep inventing new ways to submarine domestic development and make every consumer good more expensive. But every unemployed person ultimately faces the problem alone, as bills accumulate and the daily reality becomes more bleak. I find myself becoming despondent.

Meanwhile, ICE—Immigration and Customs Enforcement—has recently received a massive cash transfusion from the Taco Administration, making it America’s largest law enforcement agency. This tops the previous largest agency, Customs and Border Protection. To meet the Administration’s demand for more deportations, ICE is offering luxurious sign-on benefits and expedited training. It’s also notoriously handing firearms to loose cannons and dangerous people.

In this tumultuous context, my friend good-heartedly suggested I join ICE. Why not get that lush government bag, she said, while also standing against the rampant violence we’ve seen unfolding in Minnesota? I’ve read and heard similar stories for years. Applicants join the police, military, federal agencies, and other secure government jobs, full of idealism, eager to push reform peacefully, from within. These stories seldom end well.

We’ve probably all heard anecdotes. For serious sources, let’s consider Shane Bauer, author of American Prison. As a journalistic project, Bauer took a job as a corrections officer at a private prison in Louisiana. In his telling, Bauer started off idealistic, eager to discover how prisons change prisoners while making a profit. He left the project, though, when his girlfriend reported his private communications becoming increasingly bitter, vindictive, and violent.

Matt Taibbi describes something similar while writing about Eric Garner. He quotes a patrolman who joined the NYPD, hoping to challenge the department’s bureaucratic cruelty. But subject to constant micromanagement and quotas, he found he hadn’t changed the department, it changed him. Besides this, agencies notoriously find inventive ways to enforce conformity, resist scrutiny, and punish reformers and whistleblowers.

Citizens protest the continued ICE presence in Minnesota, January 2026

We could discuss why this happens. Maybe power corrupts, but as Brian Klaas demonstrates, power also attracts those most willing to be corrupted. People who become cops and corrections officers already have a vindictive streak; power simply gives them official vestments. Besides law enforcement, we’ve probably all seen laborers who became managers, students who became teachers, renters who became landlords, and adopted the worst aspects of their new positions.

Colleagues of good standing could, hypothetically, stop this. But we know they don’t. Six ICE officers dog-piled on Alex Pretti before one finally shot him; three officers surrounded Derek Chauvin as he knelt on George Floyd, not stopping Chauvin, but forming a human barricade to keep civilians back. Maybe officers high-minded enough to stop the violence already quit the agencies, but more likely, participants conformed themselves to the existing structure.

These patterns aren’t unique to law enforcement, though police ubiquity makes it more visible. When institutional rot infiltrates a subculture, purging it is rare. We’ve seen private corporations, college fraternities, and other civilian organizations succumb, even if they aren’t protected by qualified immunity. Put simply, those who have power, even limited power within a specific institution, become enamored of it, and perform heinous acts to protect it.

Nor are these effects limited by circumstances. Shane Bauer recalls needing months to recover from the aggression he learned as a corrections officer, rewriting his book several times to purge the anger. Eyal Press describes the ways that COs, drone bomber pilots, and even meat-packing workers experience wartime levels of flashbacks and nightmares. Social psychologist Rachel MacNair calls this phenomenon perpetration-induced traumatic stress.

I’d argue that the violence we’re now seeing enacted in Minnesota, is a more extreme version of violence we’ve all seen before. From schoolyard fistfights and fraternity hazing, to union busting and workplace interrogation, to police violence at anti-police violence protests, it’s all the same. In a structurally unequal society, those who benefit can maintain their standing only through force, or threats of force. Wealth, power, and status are therefore innately violent.

Therefore, changing from within isn’t possible. Though some individuals make some progress, and the occasional abuser may get purged and prosecuted, lone idealists generally can’t fix broken systems. Once the institutional rot becomes widespread enough that the institution must close ranks to protect itself, there’s little chance of “reform.” The system will warp and destroy those who learn its ways, no matter how idealistic.

Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part Three

This essay follows from Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part One and Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part Two.

We humans intensely comprehend our own limitations, fears, and psychological twinges, because we’re all passengers inside our own heads. We can never truly understand other people’s mental states from outside. In my last two essays, I made sweeping generalizations about working-class and upper-class mindsets, but I’m no scientist. I simply constructed a tentative hypothesis from personal experience, conversations, and observing public figures.

To recap, I suggested that most people have conditioned inner narratives driving their workplace habits, and “work ethic” is the benign manifestation of malignant inner trauma. I attribute this trauma to fathers, perhaps because my sources, both personal and public, are men. Maybe women learn more workplace habits from mothers; leave an informed comment. Either way, our “work ethic” is an external tool to paper over inner damage.

But this carries deeper implications: if I’m right, then work ethic, and workplace habits generally, orient toward the past. We appease the voices which exposed our inadequacies as children, constantly trying to silence condemnations that, as adults, only exist in our own heads. Addiction treatment specialist Gabor Maté says something similar about substance users, that they mostly want to assuage pain which their brains keep inflicting on themselves.

(As an aside, many friends have warm, supportive relationships with their fathers. I largely did, too, before his memory started failing. I don’t disparage fathers, but observe how they sustain patterns which they themselves don’t realize have caused harm.)

Contra this past orientation, most spiritual traditions favor a mindful orientation toward the present. Buddhist meditation, Christian centering prayer, and Taoist wandering all encourage supplicants to exist in the present, attuned to each moment, listening for the universe’s subtle call. The workplace of capitalist accrual reminds us of past voices and future rewards. But spiritual practice calls us to exist here, now, as we are.

Bringing spirituality into a workplace ethics discussion is, I realize, risky. Many True Believers insist their spiritual tradition is uniquely true, which could split my audience. Yet bear with me. For all their manifold differences, the religions I’ve studied share a core proposition that the person before us, the community around us, or the conflict buffeting us, holds primacy in our spirituality. Here. Now.

Overcoming the inherent “work ethic” trauma means attuning ourselves to the present. It means listening to instructions, not in fear of punishment or longing for reward, but as they are. It means recognizing our bosses as humans, with the foibles and needs that entails, and not as manifestations of engrained father images. It requires being attuned enough to our own bodies and limitations to say, without malice or fear, “No.”

Humans find ourselves torn between our carnal condition, driven substantially by past traumas and future needs, and our spiritual nature, which faces the present. What’s worse, our spiritual leaders, themselves facing the same tension, encourage this divide. When a millennia-old textbook becomes more important than the immediate person, conflict, or community, then spiritual leaders sink to the level of employers and politicians.

Moreover, the worldly forces which profit from our “work ethic” trauma, already know this. That’s why they barge into our spiritual domains. Billionaires and politicians have transformed Christianity into a nationalist front, reduced “self-care” to retail therapy, and taught us to see mindfulness as a professional strategy. Developing a spiritual discipline will entail purging the anti-spiritual influences from your tradition.

The spiritual equanimity I describe has no single path. Despite me mentioning prayer and meditation, I’ve found these disciplines of limited personal value. But I’ve achieved something comparable by writing poetry: listening to each moment, and selecting the most appropriate word which exists, has helped me attune myself to the present. Whatever removes you from past traumas and future mirages may be your path toward spiritual balance.

This conclusion probably feels abstruse, distant from my starting premise. Yet I believe it holds together. Whether it’s my father chastising me for slowing down, or Errol Musk chastising Elon for not collecting enough accomplishment tokens, that condemning voice comes from the past. The past thus can’t save us, nor the future, which doesn’t yet exist. Only in the present, the spiritual center, can we escape that conditioning.

Elon Musk and I learned incompatible messages from our fathers, which produce wholly divergent outcomes. Yet the harm those messages continue to produce have made us smaller, spiritually less developed beings. And we could both escape by reorienting ourselves away from those messages. But that means stopping seeing ourselves as economic actors, and redefining ourselves as human.

Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part Two

This essay follows from Toxic Work Ethic in America, Part One.

Elon Musk

Elon Musk, currently likely to become America’s first trillionaire, has a conflicted history with his father, South African entrepreneur Errol Musk. Elon tries to deny Errol’s part-ownership of an emerald mine, for instance, but Errol calls that pure mythology. Even if Errol didn’t bankroll Elon’s earliest ventures, his wealth allowed Elon freedom to pursue an education, experiment with technology, and start several businesses in his early twenties.

If, as I said previously, people arrogant enough to become billionaires and presidents aren’t conditioned in childhood to be self-effacing, that doesn’t mean they’re unconditioned. And like me, their conditioning comes heavily from fathers. My father conditioned me, mainly by yelling, to maintain a self-destructive work ethic, pushing myself to the brink of collapse, then returning home too depleted to do housework. Elon’s father conditioned him to… well.

Like Elon, Errol was a serial entrepreneur, who also used his wealth to buy out enterprises that piqued his interest. Like Elon, Errol married a glamorous, accomplished wife, but seemingly paid her little attention, letting Maye Musk pursue her interests without support or awareness. Like Elon, Errol is sexually voracious: Elon has fourteen children by four women that we know about, while Errol had a child with his own stepdaughter.

Where my father taught me to deny myself and disappear entirely into my role as an employee, student, battalion member, or whatever, Errol Musk taught Elon to elevate himself, and his desires, over other people. Errol conditioned his son to be constantly self-seeking, always aware of ways he falls short or looks small. My father conditioned be to be self-abnegating, while Errol conditioned Elon to be self-centered.

I don’t know Elon’s full story, partly because Elon often contradicts himself regarding his biography. So I’ll draw an analogy. Joe Plumeri, former CEO of the Willis Group, opens his memoir by describing his father showing him the luxurious houses around his New Jersey hometown. Describing himself later as a “workaholic” who loves showing his father around his accomplishments, it becomes clear: Plumeri has spent his life appeasing his father.

Sigmund Freud

One could extend the comparison. Consider the American Presidents and presidential candidates who considered the Presidency their birthright: John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison, George W. Bush. George H.W. Bush and Al Gore were both sons of senators. The Kennedy family exists. John McCain, whose father and grandfather were both four-star admirals, had his military career stall because of his POW status; he ran for President partly to outrank his ancestors.

Developmental psychologists describe human behavior as “highly conditioned.” In plain English, this means our past circumstances shape our present options. We cannot make a completely original decision, but rather see our opportunities defined by our life experiences. Many of the conditioning agents that shape our ability to see fall into two broad categories: standards we want to live up to, and mistakes we want to live down.

Again, for many of us, fathers (or father figures) shape our perceptions. My father taught me to see myself as part of a unit: whether a workplace, a classroom, or a military battalion, I needed to diminish. If I took an unscheduled break, yawned loudly, or even slowed down notably, my father volubly reminded me that I wasn’t just shirking my individual duties. I was letting the entire group down.

Meanwhile, billionaire fathers teach their sons to seek themselves. Sometimes this self-seeking is a doom spiral, as Cornelius Vanderbilt failed to teach his sons business acumen, and the Vanderbilt fortune eventually disappeared. Other times, this self-seeking accrues wealth and power. We can see this in how billionaires treat others: Elon’s multiple divorces and President Taco’s Epstein Island adventures show they see women as consumable resources, not people.

My military analogy recurs. Rank-and-file soldiers internalize an ethos of self-sacrifice, and learn to see heroic death as the ultimate virtue. And I do mean “learn”: cult expert Daniella Mestyanek Young writes that basic training doesn’t teach military skills, it teaches self-abnegation and the primacy of the unit. As a collective, the military survives by teaching its members that their individual lives aren’t worth saving.

Elon Musk claims to work 100 hours per week. This feels specious, since he also claims to be a world-class competitive videogame player, while recently tweeting nearly 100 times per day. But even if it’s true, Musk doesn’t work those soul-breaking hours because he’s disappeared into his job. Instead, he’s made his companies an instrument of his ego, something to inflate himself, though it will never leave him full.