Down and Out in Milwaukee, Wisconsin

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 108
Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

If your landlord signs the eviction papers, movers will simply show up at your door unannounced. Like an antimatter Santa Claus, they’ll gather your belongings and dump them curbside, with the common trash, or for an added fee, they’ll store everything until you can collect and move it. Chances are, though, if you’re too broke to cover rent, you’re also too broke for storage or relocation, so very probably, you’ll lose everything in one morning.

Social scientists have written extensively about poverty as an all-encompassing phenomenon, often folding eviction among poverty’s other crushing outcomes. But sociologist Matthew Desmond wondered about eviction, the tenant’s forced removal, in its own right. He followed eight households in 2007 and 2008 as their landlords turned them out, and two landlords struggling to make a living against delinquent payments. The observations he records are chilling. Sadly, they won’t surprise anybody who’s ever risked missing rent.

The households Desmond follows break into two camps: chronically impoverished Black city dwellers, and dead-broke White trailer-park denizens. Most are receiving some form of government poverty protection, in the form of food stamps, disability insurance, or other welfare. These protections, however, have remained frozen at such low levels for decades, while rents have skyrocketed, that after paying the landlord, they often have under $100 for every expense all month, including feeding and clothing their children.

Desmond’s two landlords break likewise, but aren’t in similar straits. Sherrena mainly rents to tenants who are Black like herself, while Tobin governs his White trailer park through low-wage employees, whom he hires on-site. Both are full-time landlords, meaning they make their living by maintaining their properties and collecting rent. If their tenants don’t pay promptly, they can’t cover their own expenses. They sometimes dance as close to penury as their tenants, but not often.

As Desmond tells his subjects’ stories, some important themes quickly arise. Tenants want the dignity and stability which the home brings. Desmond conveys this hunger when they tell their stories in their own words. They want to collect their mail reliably, send their kids to just one school, and where possible, look for work. But they can’t. Once you’ve been evicted, finding another house is nigh-impossible, so looking for safe housing becomes a full-time job.

Permanent insecurity becomes the dominant force in tenants’ lives. Work, family, and community become secondary to finding four walls. Though he tries to avoid too many narrator interjections, Desmond does quote some sociological research to contextualize his observations: researchers have demonstrated that lacking a stable address makes people less likely to engage with their communities. They live life in permanent expectation that they’ll be forcibly uprooted tomorrow. For children especially, this imprinting has lifelong consequences.

Matthew Desmond

Landlords, meanwhile, aren’t necessarily villains. Some, like Sherrena, enter the property business because it’s their ticket to economic stability and growth. Desmond describes Sherrena, a former schoolteacher and welfare recipient, overcoming her own poverty to afford Caribbean vacations and expensive date nights with her husband. Unfortunately, the more property she owns, the more her property owns her. Before long, she finds herself enforcing regulations full-time, while denigrating her tenants to preserve her own fragile sanity.

Reading Desmond’s prose, it’s clear he’s desperately trying to remain neutral on the conflict between landlords and evicted tenants. His sympathies, however, patently lie with the tenants. Fear and desperation increase the likelihood that they’ll make catastrophic mistakes and get evicted again. This means they have an adversarial relationship, not only with their landlords, but with other institutions of civic order, especially the police, who enforce property laws. Then the 2007 housing crisis hits.

Something Desmond treads carefully around, but avoids addressing too directly, is: housing cannot be a universal human right, and a lucrative capital investment, simultaneously. Landlords can only profit, and therefore make a living, if housing is valuable, meaning scarce in relation to demand. Given the choice between property rights and human dignity, the system demands that landlords choose property, because if they don’t, they’ll lose their own dignity, too. The system is rigged to protect stuff.

This book began as Desmond’s doctoral dissertation, and that influence remains visible. Though he’s worked to translate his most opaque passages into vernacular English, and has retained his subjects’ coarse language, he sometimes has to explain difficult context, which can mean passages of dense academese. These passages are rare, though. Desmond has mostly crafted a chilling account of how property, or the lack, transforms human value systems. This book is tough reading without feeling convicted.

Kyle Rittenhouse, Vigilantism, and Me

Accused vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse, captured on a cellphone video

I was seventeen years old when the 1992 Los Angeles Riots broke out, the same age that accused Kenosha vigilante Kyle Rittenhouse is right now. I remember sitting in a classroom with another high schooler, spitballing the idea of us taking rifles to LA and helping restore order. This other kid and I clearly had the same adolescent power fantasies which drove Rittenhouse to shoot three this week, killing two.

Why, then, did Rittenhouse do it, and we didn’t? Perhaps it's easy to say that, despite the power fantasies made possible by firearms and White teenage arrogance, I had enough empathy to avoid making that mistake. But saying that, elevates me, makes me the hero of this story, which I’m not. I’ve spent several days struggling to understand what motivated two different outcomes, and realized there’s no single answer.

Clearly our thinking began similarly. With the comfortable self-importance that comes with American Whiteness, we valued social stability and property rights more than justice and human life. We thought stopping “savage lawlessness” justified violence. Which, as I write it, seems really disingenuous, since the Rodney King riots actually killed sixty-three people, and Rittenhouse wanted to kill people waving placards. Maybe we were unified in general distrust of Black people.

Or perhaps Rittenhouse and I arose from remarkably different intellectual ecosystems. Like Rittenhouse, I was a conservative Republican in 1992; my views have shifted significantly since then. But in 1992, the Republican President, George HW Bush, promised a “kinder, gentler nation.” It’s hard to imagine even hard-line conservatives accepting civilian violence back then, when we still believed the state had a monopoly on legitimate violence.

Rittenhouse, by contrast, arose from a milieu where a Republican President called peaceful protesters “sons of bitches” and fantasized about knocking heads. Rittenhouse’s shootings happened the night after the President had Mark and Patricia McCloskey as keynote speakers at the Republican National Convention. The McCloskeys, of course, threatened a crowd of protesters in suburban St. Louis; like Rittenhouse, the McCloskeys raced around recklessly with their fingers on the trigger.

The McCloskeys were treated like heroes by America’s right-wing media. Their paranoid fantasies about crime and anarchy, patently absurd from suburbanites who clearly don’t know how to handle guns responsibly, have gotten repeated extensively. The media loves a simple, morally binary narrative of heroes and villains—a love made visible whenever they treat Black shooting victims, like Jacob Blake, differently than White shooters like Rittenhouse.

Such black-and-white thinking has undoubtedly contributed to the rise of authoritarians in American politics. While left-wingers like me have clogged many column inches with ruminations on how awful the President’s autocratic tendencies are, his leading challenger is hardly better. Besides his documented racist and sexist tendencies, Joe Biden has famously spitballed on solving crime using more private firearms. Voting Democratic won’t solve this problem, not this year anyway.

Then, it’s impossible to exclude the firearm from the ecosystem. My father, a career military man who graduated from two different boot camps, openly distrusts private firearms and refuses to own any. By contrast, Rittenhouse had an AR-15-style rifle, which it’s unlawful for minors to purchase or possess, so he presumably got it from a parent or other trusted adult. It’s impossible to have a shooting without a gun.

Yet, having said all that, I still feel dissatisfied using these data points to explain Rittenhouse’s violence. What, in this remarkable ecology of authoritarianism, provided sufficient authorization for actually shooting protesters? I’ll state again: as a teenager, with a teen’s inflated self-importance, I had power fantasies similar to those Rittenhouse displayed, but I didn’t act on them. What self-granted moral justification did Rittenhouse have, that I didn’t?

Would-be vigilantes Mark and Patricia McCloskey, captured on another cellphone image

Obviously there’s no single answer. I’m still struggling to comprehend all the influences which comprise this ecology of violence. Like a literal ecology, this violence is a complex balance of contributing factors which nourish one another. Just as you cannot have trees without moss, and birds without trees, you cannot have violence without authoritarianism, and so on. Identifying one sufficient cause is fruitless… yet it still feels somehow necessary.

Since at least John Locke, Western philosophy has contended that the state has a unique monopoly on violence. Leftists are quick to rebuke violence whenever protests turn into riots. But the degree to which some have made Kyle Rittenhouse a hero suggests conservatives no longer believe this. They think individuals have the right to take the law into their own hands. It feels like we’re living in a failing state.

The Revolution Will Not Be, Period

A Black Lives Matter flag (news photo)

“Hey, Justin! You have a job application in the trailer?” Our bubble-bellied HVAC installer, call him Brian, swaggered in from his long lunch, hitching his belt as high as his love handles would permit.

“They make you go through the office,” said Justin, our site supervisor, pointing vaguely toward our general contractor’s regional office. “Why? You looking for a job?”

“Naw, I just drove past Walgreens, and there was some Black guy waving a Black Lives Matter flag. I thought, maybe if he got a job, he’d be too busy working to fucking protest like a little bitch.”

I watched Justin turn stone-faced instantly. Like me, outright racism angers him, but like me, he’s learned saying anything is like shouting against the wind. Our workplace, and probably our entire industry, is so permeated with racism, that complaining about it is useless.

Recently I’ve seen increasing calls on social media for America’s workers to reject voting, abandon civil politics, and unify for a Marxist uprising. Choosing between elephants and jackasses is mental slavery, the call goes. Only revolution will change our condition! This implies multiple problems. First, Marx postulated a spontaneous revolution arising from working-class consciousness, not a planned rebellion; as the Soviets learned, a centralized uprising invites Stalinism.

Worse, though, as social scientists have observed, American workers lack class consciousness. Or so I’ve thought. They actively resist calls to organize, even the fairly mild organization of a registered labor union. American workers don’t think of themselves as workers, as socialist writer Barbara Garson discovered. They see working as incidental, something they’ll eventually surpass and abandon. Why have class consciousness when we consider economic class only temporary?

But this week’s exchange between Brian and Justin crystallized for me why Americans lack class solidarity: because we have racial solidarity. American workers see themselves as in the same boat as billionaires because we share what W.E.B. DuBois called “the wage of whiteness.” In a society which considers white skin a mark of character, we perceive strong kinship bonds with people who share our race, not our economics.

We enjoy the protection of believing billionaires share something important with us pedestrians. They don’t, of course, as anybody who’s ever worked in an Amazon warehouse already knows. But we persist in seeing ourselves as having more in common with Jeff Bezos than with someone like Jacob Blake. And anyone who protests therefore contravenes White Americans’ idea of who, exactly, we are.

Surrounded by a pervasive narrative of up-by-your-bootstraps industriousness, White Americans have internalized a message that financial success, and therefore transcendence of economic class, comes entirely from within. My co-workers believe they can work themselves out of penury, despite the lived evidence; many believe that only time and travail stand between themselves and dreams of unsurpassed wealth. And they remain undeterred by the fact that nobody they know has achieved this.

Why then—I wondered, in a flash of confused insight—do they consider billionaires like Goerge Soros and Bill Gates as untrustworthy enemies? This confused me for several minutes, until I concluded: these billionaires want to change a system that permanently disadvantages the poor. If White workers accept the Soros/Gates narrative, they must accept that their poverty isn’t a momentary hiccup, it’s a persistent state. This contradicts their deeply internalized narrative.

Both grassroots organizing, and top-level reforms, remind workers that their position in “the system” isn’t transitory. If they resisted the hierarchy, then whatever advantages they’ve attained would necessarily derive from the system, not themselves. Changing the damaged system will negate their minor achievements. As I’ve said before, changes which increase fairness for populations, are often deeply unfair to individuals, and vice versa.

Workers like Brian have worked hard and played by the rules, sometimes for decades. Many have dedicated their entire adult lives to making incremental gains in the system. Any change in the markedly unfair system will cost them everything they’ve achieved. They’ll embrace the continued unfair system, and demand others assimilate into that system, before admitting that they owe their gains to a rigged system. It’s difficult to blame them.

That’s why the Marxist revolution won’t happen in my lifetime. Because it’ll take longer than that for White Americans to see they have more in common with that protester waving the BLM flag, than with the management class. The tension between the mainstream American narrative, and the reality which protesters demonstrate, isn’t just difficult, it’s painful. Like anybody in pain, they’ll lash out petulantly at the doctor offering a cure.

Post-Language Politics

There’s an internet meme going around: somebody’s screen-capped tweet declaring “Man, I miss living in precedented times.” Several versions of this message exist, and it’s tough to find where it originated. It’s probably a form of Multiple Independent Discovery. But the message comes across loud and clear: today’s America is truly untrodden ground, in ways our much-lauded Western Frontier never really was, and without guidance, we’re truly lost.

Yesterday’s discovery that the Republican National Committee has elected to not draft a 2020 party platform has, as the RNC itself predicted, been misrepresented. For starters, as their one-page resolution announces, it doesn’t mean they don’t have a platform; they’ve simply chosen to continue the 2016 platform, mutatis mutandis, into 2020. This means continuing the wholesale rejection of the Obama Administration, which hasn’t exercised any meaningful power since early 2011.

The part which gains the most attention is the resolution “That the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President’s America-first agenda.” Op-ed writers, especially those in the left-wing echo chamber, have claimed this “looks like a full-throated embrace of the Führerprinzip,” the inevitable Hitler comparison. This analogy, however, is wrong-headed. They’re currently only giving the party, not the nation, over to their designated secular messiah.

Rather than pearl-clutching comparisons to Anschluss, we’re seeing something altogether more subtle and insidious. The Republican Party isn’t relinquishing control to Trump; rather, they’re relinquishing meaning. The current Republican leadership doesn’t believe words mean anything, and therefore haven’t bothered to create new ones; they coast on promises they made in completely different cultural and economic times. Because why bother saying anything new when saying anything only clouds the issue?

This decision to eschew binding policy principles goes hand-in-glove with Saturday’s announcement that President Trump will speak at all four nights of the Republicans’ online convention. Republicans have chosen to foreground the one personality binding their party together. This feels like a double-dog dare for Americans to compare Republicans to the National Socialists, who similarly had a guiding personality rather than a platform. Everything old is new again.

Yet the comparison feels unsatisfying. I cannot help referring back to French scholar Christian Ingrao, who writes about the brain trust that controlled the Nazi machine. Many leading Nazis had achieved habilitation, a European academic standing that meant they’d essentially completed two doctorates. For all that the Nazis’ success relied upon Hitler’s on-camera demagoguery, the party actually had elaborate administrative machinery to do the actual work of governing.

By contrast, the Republicans outspokenly believe government is immoral, and any effort to make or enforce laws is futile. Sure, the politicians most likely to claim this are also most likely to advocate paramilitary tactics to silence dissent, but that’s ceremonial dressing. For passive conformists, they believe, government always impedes individual morality, which they consider paramount. To the party leaders, every mensch is an übermensch.

Current Republican leadership is, if anything, more Nietzschean than any prior political movement. They believe that morals and standards exist to hobble lesser individuals and prevent them rising against their betters. Morals, to the Nietzschean, are created by aristocrats, to yoke the masses into serving their greater mission. This doesn’t mean, as some misrepresent, that the übermensch is an amoral villain. The truly enlightened person, Nietzsche asserted, wouldn’t need morals.

Nazis believed themselves Nietzschean because they saw themselves clearing Germany’s deadwood to permit the promised übermensch to arrive. But they still relied upon party pronouncements, manifestoes, and bureaucracy to achieve that goal. The Republicans, by contrast, reject every aspect of organization, at least as it defines their chosen leadership. Guiding principles of governance, leadership, and morality simply don’t apply to their designated übermensch.

Please don’t misunderstand me. The Democrats, as I’ve written recently, are equally disappointing, making high-minded promises during campaigns, then offering the weakest possible compromise once elected. They’ve been institutionally complicit in America’s recent decline into Gilded Age inequality and moral decrepitude. But at least they still believe words mean something, evidenced by the fact that their digital conference included a wide range of speakers, and even some ceremonial policy debate.

Republicans, by contrast, believe nothing means anything. Their superhero, unencumbered by somebody else’s moral suit, can act, free from verbally learned limitations. Sure, they’ll create false divisions to constrain everybody else, because that’s what words do: yoke the weak and constrain their appetites. But the hero, whether the hero politician, the hero businessman, or the hero general, is free. If the masses can’t distinguish that freedom from nihilism, who cares?

Liberty, Responsibility, and Spirituality: a Rumination

Why are Americans so spectacularly bad at regulating ourselves? This question has become particularly pointed in the COVID-19 era, when we’ve witnessed an eminently preventable disease sweep through our country, causing economic devastation and personal tragedy. The quintessential American definition of “freedom,” meaning personal autonomy as close to perfect as possible, requires a citizenry willing to regulate itself. Why do we seem unable to do that?

In my younger, more conservative days, I tried my hand at political Libertarianism. It didn’t take. For me, Libertarianism was intellectual hygiene: if government is bad, as conservatives believe, and there’s no clearly definable boundary between “enough government” and “too much government,” I reasoned, then the only conclusion is total abolition of government altogether. Let Americans regulate themselves! We have, I insisted, the wisdom that governments just don’t.

But Libertarianism failed for me because simple observation demonstrated that while Americans perhaps could regulate ourselves, we clearly don’t. As a people, we’re too often drunken, selfish, reckless with money, and heedless of safety. Even before COVID, I watched seemingly reasonable citizens drive at breakneck speeds on residential streets, and rewire their houses without tripping the breaker first. American behavior frequently crosses from inconsiderate, into downright destructive.

Admittedly, outside regulation does only incrementally better. I struggled to define the problem, until I read James C. Scott. He describes the tension between central governments and local communities to manage resources, including land and labor. Governments struggle without what Scott terms “local knowledge,” the intimate familiarity with conditions that comes from knowing and working closely with a place and community. Governments standardize; communities localize.

What knowledge, I realized, is more inherently local, than knowledge of oneself? Just as pre-modern communities regulate themselves by knowing their land and their people intimately, individuals could hypothetically know themselves intimately enough to regulate their responses to crime, economic insecurity, and pandemic. The reason we can’t regulate ourselves, I grasped with a jolt, is because too many Americans don’t know themselves intimately. We’re strangers to ourselves.

This demands two follow-up questions: why don’t we know ourselves better? And how can we fix it? The first is easy. We can’t see ourselves from outside; we need to outsource some knowledge of ourselves onto others because we’re limited and finite. Just as local communities must sometimes seek opinions from neighboring communities, or the federal government, to understand their conditions, we likewise need others’ input to understand ourselves better.

The repair becomes sticky, because it involves a word which makes many Americans squeamish today: spirituality. Let us stress, this doesn’t necessarily mean religion, though it could. Rather, historic spiritual practices, like Christian centering prayer or Buddhist meditation, involve pausing the rhythms the world enforces upon us externally, and hearing ourselves better. Only by pausing the world, and listening to ourselves, can we gain local knowledge to regulate ourselves.

I don’t mean this frivolously. The outside world demands we satisfy the economy, support the hierarchy, and abnegate ourselves. Though we have institutions rather than kings today, capitalism has centralized power more thoroughly than Louis XIV could’ve ever dreamed. This centralized order demands individuals set aside dreams, work for others, and pursue appetites—which spirituality demands we see and resist. Spiritually autonomous people make poor consumers and wage slaves.

Addiction specialist Gabor Maté describes addicts as the ultimate slaves to appetite. Driven by trauma or isolation, they seek something to numb the pain. But what does anyone do, when we define ourselves by bigger houses and sleeker cars, than a socially acceptable version of addictive behavior? Likewise, Maté writes, addicts gradually develop control over their appetites using Buddhist meditation. Though many, including Maté himself, remain agnostic, spirituality yields self-control.

American libertarianism might work if citizens had spiritual self-control. While we’ll always necessarily outsource some acts of regulating ourselves to our neighbors, who can see us in context more objectively, we might captain our lives better if we knew ourselves better. But we don’t. We’ve relinquished all forms of self-knowledge to corporations, billionaires, and financiers. Americans can’t regulate ourselves because we’re strangers from ourselves, walking around with weak, malnourished souls.

Watching Americans demand their freedom without knowing themselves first, I believe we could’ve avoided this whole catastrophe. The problem began long before a noisy, aggressive minority thought they were too important to wear masks. It began when Americans surrendered decision-making authority to rich property owners, while maintaining the illusion that they were free. We’re an individualist society full of withered individuals, and the only solution is to turn inward.

Locked in a Brain Cell

1001 Movies To See Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 41
Travis Milloy (writer-director), Infinity Chamber

Frank Lerner awakens in a spit-shined, glossy prison cell. He has no recollection how he arrived, or when. His only contact is Howard, a corrections officer he only meets through a suspended security camera. Frank struggles to reconstruct events leading to his arrest, hoping to return to real life. But Howard has orders: he must interrogate Frank, using complex hallucinogenic stimulators. Howard, Frank realizes, is a computer.

Writer-director Travis Milloy creates a moody, smothering dystopia of constant surveillance, which is more remarkable for his limited budget. He shot this movie for less than most Hollywood productions spend on hair and makeup. He completely eschewed digital effects, using Hitchcock-like camera techniques to conceal his simple, practical design. The product looks sleek and expensive, and more polished than some recent big-studio extravaganzas.

Desperate for information, Frank agrees to strategic horse-trades with Howard. He submits to interrogations, provided Howard shares whatever data he can. These interrogations involve putting Frank into a trance and returning him to the hours before his arrest. In return, Howard shares… not much. Almost every question returns the answer “I can’t access that information, Frank.” As he constantly reminds Frank, Howard can only do what he’s programmed to do.

Frank’s trances, meanwhile, become increasingly intricate. Howard keeps returning Frank to a Los Angeles café, and a fleeting encounter with a pretty barista, Gabby. However, Frank doesn’t merely repeat the same memory. He quickly begins manipulating events, prying his own recall for details. (“Frank” is an ironic name; we learn he’s far from forthcoming. “Lerner” is loaded, too.) Soon, he controls the interrogation sessions, or anyway he thinks he does.

Christopher Soren Kelly, as Frank, paces his narrow cell, arguing with Howard, conveying both urgency and claustrophobia with only a few repeating movements. Kelly’s performance suggests a young Al Pacino, before he started shouting almost every role. Jesse D. Arrow plays Howard with a passive-aggressive air that barely conceals his menace, accentuated by restless “body language” from his security camera. We almost forget the actor isn’t onscreen.

Frank Lerner (Christopher Soren Kelly) strategizes his escape in Infinity Chamber

On one level, this movie unpacks themes familiar from more iconic productions, like The Matrix and Dark City. Frank begins to question the evidence of his senses, because the hallucinations Howard produces are so elaborate, he can’t distinguish the borders of reality. However, we don’t simply rehash those Hollywood standards. This movie cares more about issues of power and authority, and our ability to make informed decisions in civil society.

Because, we learn from Frank’s interrogations, he lives in a pervasive surveillance state. Pedestrians find themselves constantly harangued by spy drones, and cash registers have built-in retinal scanners. Made shortly after Edward Snowden pantsed President Obama’s NSA, this movie stresses that it’s not possible to dance the line between security and freedom, because there’s no line. Powerful institutions always use “security” to bolster their dominion over us peons.

Frank maintains two relationships throughout this movie. He becomes amiable with Howard, his jailer, and they even begin calling each other friends. Howard starts helping Frank, asking prodding questions that unlock troubling memories. Meanwhile, as Frank manipulates his hallucinations, his memory of the barista, Gabby, becomes self-aware, and they develop a romance. Subtle visual cues, however, suggest this romance is just another top-level power play.

We learn America, outside Frank’s prison cell, is undergoing a revolution. Massed citizens, angry about official hypocrisy and abuse, have turned violent, and the state has retaliated. But, like in more conservative revolutionary films, this rebellion is mainly reported, not witnessed. We care more about individuals and their choices, than big, sweeping themes. While America struggles to throw off state power, Frank struggles to reclaim individual autonomy, with mixed success.

Milloy maintains a careful balance throughout this film. Frank and Howard argue and explain, while Frank and Gabby strategize, two complex ballets of verbal complexity. However, Milloy salts the movie with visual clues that the topics Frank discusses verbally, only scratch the surface of reality. The tension between what Frank says, and what Frank fails to see, comes to a sudden but remarkably subdued peak in the movie’s final scene.

Some critics suggest this movie is occasionally overlong. I suggest those critics weren’t paying attention. Even in scenes where the movie appears to turn thoughtful and languid, it plants seeds which bloom later. In a science fiction environment that has become cluttered with Star Wars or the MCU, with their love of explosions, this movie relies on character arcs and attentive audiences. Not one moment in this film is wasted.

I Got Them Old Third-Party Blues Again, Mama

George Washington (official state portrait)

President George Washington, in his Farewell Address, actually an open letter published in 1796, had many warnings for Americans. He urged Americans to maintain high standards of morality and public conduct. He encouraged Americans to remain unified in culture, heritage, and religion (which honestly was a racist dog-whistle from a notorious Deist and slaveholder). He admonished Americans to not let regional loyalty displace national loyalty. All of these remain potent admonishments to a divided nation.

Most important for our purposes, though, Washington chided the encroaching power of what he called “factions,” meaning political parties. He called factions “potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government”—and tell me that doesn’t describe today perfectly. Washington feared the increasingly heated divide between Jeffersonians and Hamiltonians could unravel everything the Revolution had built.

I recalled Washington’s warnings last week, when a heated debate arose on my Facebook page. A young idealist, disgusted by the Democratic Party’s essentially conservative Presidential slate, insisted it’s time to embrace a third party. She came sideways against two arguments: Democratic Party loyalists angrily denounced any attempt to split the center-left vote, which would hold doors for right-wing candidates potentially worse than the current administration. Others, including me, advocated voting Blue for harm reduction.

Briefly, I support the third party idea, hypothetically. The current partisan duopoly has controlled American politics since 1854. Nobody has seriously challenged their dominion since Ross Perot in 1992, and no outside challenger has netted electoral votes since George Wallace in 1968—that’s too damn long. This dominion has produced more agreement than action. As Eric Blanc writes, the Democrats, representing the nominal left, have offered a lite-beer Republican platform since at least the 1970s.

Thomas Jefferson (official state portrait)

Yet in considering how to implement actual third-party organizations, I have significant doubts. Consider the UK, which is more receptive to smaller parties, despite having a similar winner-take-all electoral system to the USA. The organized left is dispersed around Labour, the SNP, Greens, Social Democrats, and Plaid Cymru, among others. This splits the left-wing vote, and in some constituencies, the Conservatives sometimes win, despite being perennially unpopular and only netting about one-third of the vote.

This tension, between political ideals and practicality, encounters a further impediment when considering America’s third-party history. Insurgent parties frequently survive or fail according to individual personalities. The American Reform Party collapsed into infighting and irrelevance when Ross Perot retired. Similarly, we’ve seen almost-successful parties organized around George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and Teddy Roosevelt, all fail spectacularly when their figureheads stepped down. As we’re seeing today, personality politics is a dangerous precedent in a free society.

Granted, the present administration demonstrates that established parties are vulnerable to this problem. Washington warned, in his Farewell Address, of a charismatic populist who would hijack party unity “to the purposes of his own elevation, on the ruins of public liberty.” The President’s base has suborned the Republicans to the point they’ve become the Donald Trump Party. Democrats have responded, not with meaningful policy proposals, but by becoming the Not-Donald Trump Party. This isn’t sustainable.

Both current political parties stand neck-deep in a neoliberal economic structure that disenfranchises most working Americans, encourages short-term thinking, and poisons the environment. I don’t want to suggest both parties are identical. One party embraces civil freedoms for racial, religious, and sexual minorities, while the other has recently authorized shooting unarmed protesters in the face. But regarding the economy, where most Americans actually live, the two parties have meaningful disagreements only on the fine-tuning level.

Alexander Hamilton (private portrait)

Some solutions are possible. David Orentlicher suggests that a two-member Presidency might lower partisan stakes significantly. At the House of Representatives level, states might abolish districts and implement statewide proportional representation. Both these options might empower third parties, since voters might poll their honest values, hoping, not to win, but to receive a robust second-place finish. It might also make procedural votes, like electing the Speaker of the House, actually subject to material debate again.

These procedural revisions might actually change American governance. They could give existing third parties, like the Greens and Libertarians, a fighting electoral chance. Revising the procedure, though, is deeply unsexy. I admit creating another third party feels active, but without procedural revisions, it would diminish left-wing voting potential. Just ask British voters, currently saddled with Boris Johnson: splitting the progressive vote has regressive outcomes. And I doubt America can survive another four years like this.

Quatermass and the Risks of Space Imperialism

Richard Fell and the BBC, The Quatermass Experiment (2005)

It’s a narrative as old as science fiction: the intrepid space explorers venture into the mysterious beyond, desperate to discover what’s out there. They venture further into space than the Apollo missions, further than the ISS, further than any humans have ever traveled from Earth before. When they return, they’re feted as heroes to the eager, waiting homelanders. But we quickly discover that they can’t travel that far from home without getting cosmos on them.

When the BBC re-staged their classic science drama The Quatermass Experiment over fifty years after the original, it was undoubtedly a spectacular feast. Producers broadcast the performance live, with on-stage effects (nothing digital) and garffed lines intact. Besides recreating the original experience, though, it also provides an important insight into post-colonial guilt. Watching this performance, one gets the impression that its producers believe its characters have something to answer for. And that something is official.

Professor Bernard Quatermass, of the British Experimental Rocket Group, fears the worst when his astronauts go incommunicado for hours. But they reconnect when the rocket begins its return approach. The capsule crash-lands in a field in Surrey and, to Quatermass’ horror, only one astronaut emerges. He rushes weak, delirious Victor Caroon back to headquarters for treatment. Once there, Caroon shows signs that his experience millions of miles from home has transformed him into something new.

The BBC staged the original Quatermass Experiment in thirty-minute episodes, also broadcast live. Producers reused Nigel Kneal’s original 1953 scripts, lightly updated for current science (only two of Kneal’s six original kinescopes survive). But they make an immediate change by casting Jason Flemyng as a much younger Quatermass. His angular features, looking like he was hand-carved from cedar with a chainsaw, distinguish him from previous, mostly middle-aged versions of Quatermass, emphasized by his rumpled suits.

Back at HQ, Dr. Gordon Briscoe (Devid Tennant) can’t explain changes in Caroon’s physiology. It’s like somebody erased Caroon and recreated him from memory. To everyone’s surprise, that memory starts getting fuzzier, as Caroon becomes aggressive and voracious. Journalists begin asking questions: is it safe to allow somebody so touched by outer space to roam freely on Earth? How has space colonialism changed the colonist? And is the homeland safe with the colonialists in it?

Here’s where my Spidey Sense started tingling. Kneal’s über-British characters, mostly (but not entirely) White, laud the great explorer abstractly, but turn squeamish at allowing him to wander native soil freely. Throughout history, British culture has lauded colonists, like John Smith or Robert Clive, yet made them feel unwelcome when they attempted to return to Britain. It’s like, you can’t travel the Empire without getting Imperialism’s stains on you. And you’ll inevitably change the homeland.

Briscoe (David Tennant) and Quatermass (Jason Flemyng) struggle to explain th
changes coming over Caroon (Andrew Tiernan), in The Quatermass Experiment

Quatermass isn’t conscious of himself as a colonist. He praises the ideas of pure science, and excuses his excesses by claiming his justifications were morally neutral. But, in maintaining the ethost of 1953, as Britain’s last meaningful stabs at colonialism were winding down, Quatermass doesn’t find a universe governed by abstract scientific principles; he finds a universe teeming with life, much of it wildly different from humanity. Victor Caroon has brought some home with him.

What happens next could be interpreted two ways. Either the colonized races, brought back to the Imperial homeland, rampage over our sacred White traditions and threaten to demolish staid British unity; or the chief colonist realizes he’s changed his homeland’s moral fabric forever, and he must abandon neutrality to restore stability. Either way, it’s difficult to separate the hybrid Caroon has become, and the steps Quatermass must take to save Earth, from British imperial history.

In other words, it’s impossible to venture out into the unknown, without bringing the unknown home. American science fiction, like Star Trek, still frequently incorporates mythology of frontier and Manifest Destiny: it’s humanity’s sovereign responsibility to occupy the universe, establishing settlements and broadening our reach. Perhaps only Britain, with its inherited guilt from centuries of imperial expansion, could recognize the moral sand trap this creates for humanity. Imperialism, the BBC acknowledges, permanently changes the homeland.

Quatermass must grapple with science’s moral implications, particularly when science expands the boundaries of human accomplishment. Nothing human beings do is morally neutral, especially not in a universe abundant with life. It reflects Britain’s imperial history that he is able to realize the ways space colonialism transform the homeland. His response could, potentially, admit of racist interpretation, depending on your lens. It could also mean he acknowledges his choices will face judgement from future history.

The End of Science Fiction Innocence

Lindsay Ellis, Axiom's End: a Novel

Cora Sabino never wanted to participate in world-shattering political changes, but the choice isn’t hers to make. Adrift in 2007 Los Angeles, Cora bounces through temp jobs she hates and can’t stick with. Her father, a government whistleblower, abandoned her years ago, more interested in ideals than his very concrete family. Then, one boring weekday in September, 2007, Cora witnesses a UFO crash-land in the hills above Altadena, California.

Film critic, screenwriter, and YouTube personality Lindsay Ellis has already earned a Hugo Award nomination for writing about science fiction. Her first novel turns from describing the genre, to participating in it. The transition is occasionally rocky, with its kitchen-sink approach to genre tropes, and its sometimes verbose expository dialog. But especially for genre fans and readers interested in her winking references, it’s an engagingly complex first effort.

Because Cora’s father claims government agents are already harboring extraterrestrials, Cora has suits in black sedans trailing her around L.A. But after the UFO crash, the CIA actually walks into her mother’s living room, asking pointed questions. Cora is apparently neck-deep in conspiracies without her consent. Things only get worse when, shrouded by urban midnight, she spots an alien dismantling her computer. Apparently, the aliens are specifically targeting her.

Old secrets come spilling quickly. While Cora’s father thinks himself a secular prophet and dishes dirt because the truth will set Americans free, her aunt works for a Men-In-Black agency. Caught between the skulking alien and the government alien hunters, Cora flees into Los Angeles County’s urban jungle. There she makes First Contact—or so she thinks. Evidently, America has known about its aliens for decades.

Science fiction audiences will recognize multiple nods to their beloved genre salted generously throughout the book. The title obviously references Arthur C. Clarke, and like Clarke, Ellis describes the damages left when childhood illusion falls away. Except for Ellis, childhood’s end isn’t gradual or revelatory, it’s violent. Ellis also uses David Brin’s ideas about the uniqueness of human evolution, and Orson Scott Card’s ideas about how brittle society’s structures are.

Most prominently, however, Ellis uses Stanisław Lem’s ideas about the fundamental impossibility of communication between humans and extraterrestrials. Chosen by a mysterious, seemingly warlike emissary to serve as translator for humanity’s government, Cora struggles to comprehend the aliens’ words, actions, and apparent value system. But communication goes deeper than words, and Cora’s inability to reconcile extraterrestrial language becomes a major impediment.

Lindsay Ellis

Notably, this happens in 2007. In our world, the housing bubble came crashing to Earth that year; Ellis simply makes that metaphorical crash more literal. Also, in 2007, Ellis was 22 years old (Cora specifies she’s 21). Ellis’ own final childhood illusions, the lessons we all internalized as children about life’s basic fairness, would’ve been ending just as her generation entered the workforce amid the worst economy since 1929.

Don’t tell me science fiction isn't timely.

Ellis’ story ranges widely, mostly throughout the western United States. Cora flees from Los Angeles to the Central Valley, out into Nevada, eventually becoming trapped in a government facility in Colorado. She also visits other locations, like Virginia and the Inland Empire, though very briefly; the story caroms with the urgency of an X-Files episode, taking in the highlights of an Ansel Adams visual tour of America. And I mean visuals; Ellis describes scenes richly.

This strikes an uneasy balance. With her filmmaking background, Ellis crafts a world rich in sensory detail. But she’s primarily a documentarian and critic, accustomed to unpacking other writers’ subtext, translating words left unsaid into vernacular English. She does that here, too, with the sometimes sluggish tendency to have characters explain situations to one another, sometimes extensively. Her own work has remarkably little subtext.

This might, perhaps, be deliberate. Because Cora discovers that humans and Fremdans share no metaphors, cultural context, or even body language, they can only communicate in words. But even words are imprecise, and often need clarification when speaking with others who don’t share your background. Throughout this novel, the futility of communication is Ellis’ most recurring theme. Perhaps she foregrounded this purposefully.

Because she combines visual and linguistic motifs, and because she lovingly poaches existing genre tropes, Ellis essentially chooses her audience. Readers already familiar with science fiction, in all its messy glory, will find much in this novel to enjoy. Having read the genre for over thirty-five years now, I can’t speculate how outsiders might receive it. As a fan, reading Ellis’ novel left me feeling acknowledged. Maybe that’s the point.

Anonymity and Modern Illness

Itzhak Perlman teaches music appreciation
to a notoriously grouchy audience

Itzhak Perlman, the Israeli-American classical violinist, was a regular guest on Sesame Street in my childhood; a quick Google search reveals he still is. The show invited him aboard to help teach child audiences classical music appreciation. His frequent character arc included an encounter with somebody, often Oscar the Grouch, who vocally disliked classical music. However, after a few bars of Paganini or whoever, the designated Muppet inevitably came around.

Perlman visibly wasn’t able to walk unaided, though. This quality sometimes went unremarked. For the Muppets of Sesame Street, Perlman’s disability mattered little; his demonstrable violin skill held their attention. However, I remember one occasion where Big Bird questioned Perlman’s crutches and leg braces. Perlman set his violin aside that day and explained the lingering scars left by his childhood battle with polio, a battle that left his legs depleted.

Then as now, violin soloists traditionally performed standing up; seated was for ensemble players. Perlman’s inability to carry his instrument onstage with the panache of Andre Rieu or Jascha Haifetz, his necessity to sit while playing, like just another contract player, made him visibly different. Sure, his violin is virtuosic, and perhaps because of my childhood exposure, Perlman remains my yardstick for violin playing. But he also just looked different.

I couldn’t help remembering that during a recent discussion about COVID-19. Like polio before it, COVID’s social and economic effects have become the dominant factor of our era. Just as parents weigh the odds of children contracting and spreading COVID today versus the long-term social development costs of keeping them isolated from peers, parents performed such cost-benefit analyses in 1952. Culturally, the difference between the diseases is vanishingly small.

One important difference, however, grabs my attention. Like Perlman on PBS in my childhood, or wards full of iron lung patients, a sight still distressingly common in my lifetime, COVID patients haven’t been particularly visible. We don’t have widely circulated images of patients on respirators, immobilized by the weight of technology keeping them alive. And we don’t have celebrities teaching children the consequences of diseases that seem like ancient history.

A pediatric iron lung ward—an image my parents' generation
would've been intimately familiar with (click to enlarge)

Because if Perlman appeared on Sesame Street recently enough to lodge in my long-term memory, it must’ve happened after America’s last case of wild-caught polio, in 1979. It took 24 years from Jonas Salk’s invention of the polio vaccine, to the disease’s eradication in the United States, and polio’s long-term effects were something my generation needed to understand. Also, unlike smallpox, wild polio still exists on Earth, and could resurge.

Equally important, Perlman’s visibility as disabled, and his willingness to discuss his disability, influenced how my generation perceived disability. I remember some third-grade bully trying to instigate taunts against a girl with cerebral palsy and, in a rare show of childhood solidarity, several of us closed ranks around her and drove the bully away. I can’t speak for others, but my response originated partly because her crutches resembled Perlman’s.

Simply put, the visibility of people with significant scars and disabilities influenced how my generation perceived health concerns. Veterans of World War II and Vietnam in wheelchairs still steer how I perceive war, and war-making policy. Itzhak Perlman’s public persona as an entertainer and children’s TV personality, probably influenced why I don’t recall any organized anti-vaxxer culture before the middle 2000s. Representation, the slogan reminds us, matters.

But we live in different times. Modern medicine has made disfiguring illnesses rare, so we seldom see people with smallpox scars, diphtheria lung, or other pathogen damage anymore. Media consolidation has marginalized people with disabilities from public view, particularly those caused by severe, visible injury. We just don’t see people suffering long-term health effects of serious disease like my generation saw on Sesame Street.

Itzhak Perlman more recently

It’s impossible to prove without long-term longitudinal studies, which it’s too early to have yet, but perhaps the popularity of anti-vax conspiracy theories and anti-mask sentiment stems from this tunnel vision. Without the visibility of people who survived past terrible outbreaks, and patients currently hoping to survive COVID, it becomes easier to rationalize risks away. People want to believe the world they see perpetuated through glossy media images is reliable.

Americans perhaps don’t respect COVID risks, and other illnesses, because we don’t see those risks portrayed widely. We don’t experience illness as real, imminent risk, as our ancestors did with polio or smallpox. What we cannot see, becomes easy to dismiss. We need ways to foreground real, living people with real consequences from illness, to remind people the risks of complacency.

The Postmodern Presidency

Donald Trump

“Don’t be misled,” many friends whispered last week, when President Trump floated a trial balloon about delaying the election. “It’s all a distraction. He doesn’t want voters looking at the disastrous economy his policies have created. Don’t give the election tweets free air, it’s all another distraction.”

Another distraction.

Let’s briefly acknowledge that it seems weird to distract voters from the economy by suggesting withholding the vote altogether, even temporarily. Yes, let’s acknowledge that, then leave it, because it doesn’t matter. I’m more interested in what it means if Trump really did attempt to distract Americans. Because the “another distraction” argument seems to occur pretty frequently.

Supposedly, Trump distracted Americans from his impeachment hearings in January by attempting to provoke war with Iran. Or, he declared a state of emergency on immigration in 2019 to distract from his legislative incompetence. Or he used his notorious 2016 theatre tweets to distract from a policy agenda so awful, even his base showed distaste.

Taken together, these accusations make Trump sound like a crafty media manipulator. He shoots pop flies to right field, the White House press corps follows them, while his minions steal home plate. Thing is, we could believe this strategy from, say, Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama, skilled communicators both. But Donald Trump? He’s as crafty as a trucker with concussion.

Trump’s long history of public incoherence, lack of forethought, and kitten-like attention span vitiate the idea of specific, point-by-point strategy. Taken together, however, they suggest a specific, and very concrete, pattern of outcomes. Trump’s opponents, eager to find his subtext, attribute remarkable meaning to the things left unsaid, while encouraging listeners to ignore his actual words.

A pattern emerges: Trump’s supporters and detractors alike increasingly distrust words. “Meaning” becomes a constant hum of notes, like a Philip Glass composition, that listeners recognize but cannot describe. We don’t understand anything, not really, we just submerge ourselves in a tide of words. Presidential language loses all import, and gist becomes entirely subjective.

Trumpian political language is, in brief, postmodern.

Michel Foucault

I recognize that saying “postmodern” invites problems. It’s a concept without agreed-upon definition, and many people use the word “postmodern” as a casual synonym for “gobbledygook.” Yet for our purposes, we can understand postmodernism as a rejection of modernism; and we can understand modernism as an attempt to create meaning.

Modernism, including philosophies like Marxism, empiricism, and existentialism, start with the assumption that universal meaning exists. It doesn’t have to come whole and revealed by God, but arises from human reasoning based on evidence. Modern philosophies seek to tie everything together with some concise, elegant narrative which explains everything.

This works well in domains like science and math, which are, to a degree, objective. We can test our narrative against reality and know whether it works, or needs amended. But modern philosophies generally crumble within the human domain, which is subjective. The human element doesn’t permit easy explanation, and most modern philosophies, when pushed hard enough, generally let in contradictions and flaws.

Postmodernism rejects modernism, meaning it rejects the idea that any single narrative ties human philosophies together. To the postmodernist, meaning is found in context, experience, and subjectivity. Meaning cannot be adduced, and then applied to new areas; instead, new areas must be experienced, because human explanations always fail.

Admittedly, a presidency that trusts doctors who believe in succubi, probably doesn’t formally have a postmodern philosophy. But in practice, that’s what we have. By teaching people to distrust language emerging from official sources, they’ve spread the belief that “meaning” emerges only subjectively. Presidential dictates cannot be tested, because they’re based on language, which is ultimately meaningless.

Jacques Derrida

There’s a problem with postmodernism, though, whether the academic postmodernism of Foucault and Derrida, or the authoritarian postmodernism of Donald Trump: humans seek meaning. We want a story that ties our actions together and guides our choices. From early humans seeking gods in rivers and stars, to scholars studying atoms and nucleotides, we want the framework that explains, if not everything, at least the choices available to us.

By reducing language to balderdash, Trumpists arguably separate meaning from authority, giving themselves the latter without the former. In practice, though, we look at them, like all postmodernists, as divorced from reality. If this continues, and politics comes to seem as far from lived reality as academia does, we plebs won’t turn to politicians, just as we don’t turn to literary critics.

Lived reality has persevered without academia. If this trajectory continues, it’ll persevere without politicians, too.

The Last Train Out of Zombie Town

Yeon Sang-ho (director), Train to Busan

Seok-woo, a tired workaholic Seoul capitalist, doesn’t want to travel; he’d rather be working. But his young daughter, Su-an, has guilted him into giving her the one thing she wants for her birthday, a trip to see her mother in Busan. He tells his assistant not to worry: “I’ll be back by lunch,” he grumbles into his cell phone as the bullet train leaves the station. Veteran audiences know his cynical optimism dooms everyone aboard.

This movie, billed as South Korea’s first zombie film, resembles Western zombie media in certain ways: the checklist of character types, mostly doomed to die. The growing paranoia, heightened by claustrophobia, as nearly the entire film occurs inside a bullet train. The grotesque body horror, as ordinary humans become distorted, twitching revenants driven by hunger. But, in making the transition to Korean culture, the zombie genre also draws in contemporary concerns and important modern symbolism.

Act One resembles a traditional horror movie, replete with little vignettes of friendly anonymity. Seok-woo ignores his daughter, hypnotized by his smartphone. Train stewards conduct business, pasted-on smiles concealing crippling boredom. A high-school baseball team commandeers one entire car. Meanwhile, enclosed in a toilet cubicle, a teenage stowaway with an ugly bite mark struggles with sudden onset of tremors she can’t readily explain. Embryonic horror simmers beneath the everyday banalities, in the Stephen King style.

There’s no transition to Act Two. Everything is normal, then instantly, one zombie becomes two, becomes four, becomes a rampaging horde. Uninfected humans race toward the train’s rear, the only refuge, while the sudden onslaught of monsters pursues them. Seok-woo, who almost loses his daughter to the invasion, becomes the group’s de facto leader when he realizes the infected can’t handle doors. He quickly makes a second discovery: they don’t attack what they can’t see.

Themes develop quickly. Seok-woo must make snap decisions about group safety, sometimes appearing to sacrifice individuals for the community. He tells his daughter she must think only of herself during this crisis, but soon realizes that’s not a sustainable attitude. Only working together will the uninfected survive. Meanwhile, Yong-suk, a fat businessman with obviously dyed hair (ahem), begins dividing survivors into the deserving and undeserving. The undeserving, he urges forward to die for self-serving purposes.

Actor Gong Yoo is most famous in South Korea for leading roles in romantic comedies and melodramas. Even to Western audiences, his appearance as Seok-woo seethes with TV-friendly masculinity. So when he gets angry, savagely attacking zombies to protect his daughter and fellow passengers, the transformation is palpable. Though it’s an ensemble movie, Seok-woo holds our central interest. The contrast between Seok-woo’s sultry good looks, and his blood-stained business shirt, becomes the movie’s dominant image.

Seok-woo (Gong Yoo) prepares his fellow survivors to fight
their way through the zombies in Train to Busan

Survivors become separated into three groups. Trapped at the back, Seok-woo, initially reluctant to fight for others, concludes they’ll only survive together. He leads an assault toward the front, knowing he’ll have to fight through entire cars filled with cannibal undead. In one scene, a high-school baseball star faces his entire team, and freezes. It makes us wonder: if our friends became zombies, could we fight them? Could we kill our friends to protect our families?

While Seok-woo gathers survivors together, Yong-suk encourages others’ paranoia. He insists they cannot know whether Seok-woo’s fighters are trustworthy, and demands they lock the doors ever tighter. Only we insiders, Yong-suk insists, can ensure we’re pure and uninfected; everyone else, even our former friends, are universally suspect. His infectious paranoia costs innocent lives, but protects himself. Seok-woo successfully saves several humans only to find himself shunned and isolated. But Yong-suk’s megalomania becomes his vulnerability.

On one level, this is an intense monster movie. The bullet train simply embodies the story’s massive momentum; the pace never slackens, and every momentary pause lets more terror into the characters’ lives. The combination of high-speed horror, glossy design, and ironic use of oversaturated daylight, gives this movie a gut-level intensity that allows audiences to enjoy it like the monster spectacular it is. You can find the deeper levels, but you don’t have to.

At another level, it’s a commentary about the fears, not always unfair, which emerge from carnivorous post-industrial capitalism. How do we protect ourselves without becoming irrational? How do we organize a community without letting demagogues hijack us for selfish ends? This movie doesn’t answer these questions, and suggests we maybe can’t answer them. Literally every choice has consequences. But it says we have to try, if any of us are going to get out alive.